Discussion on the <Blacklist> function

[SinSiew79]

After having played the game since beta, I have blisted (and later deleted) alot of RMTs over the course of the last 5 years. I see no reason to "fix" or change its function at all, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

[Raqrie_Tohka]

TL;DR For some people, if the car doesn’t perform well enough on the road, they build a better car. But I’m saying to build a better road, and a whole better traffic framework to go with it. It’s stupid when put this way, really.

If I may attempt to elaborate on why I perceive the blacklist function as not really helping:

“Competitive” atmosphere-
End-game experience is elitism rife with politics, criticality, judging, comparisons.
This is exacerbate by pressure, to do everything with absolute value and efficiency. Because this is how the game content was designed. With pressure to perform, quotas, hard grind for hard rewards. Too much of type of logic is undesirable and from this angle, much can be improved.*
Cold “end-game atmosphere”, paired with rigidity, lack of creativity, objectives-trivialisation of the designed content, results in an environment susceptible to the risk of absolute thinking, hasty attitudes, and thus toxicity.

“Institutional violence”-
It is not harsh as real institutional violence, but hear me out:
Institutional, as in “officially sanctioned action”. Systemic, part of the infrastructure. Inhumane and insensitive.
Inherent violence, as in being a nature of punishment. Players may wonder, because it is punishment, thus must have done something wrong. But what? Simply playing the game? Engaging with other players? So you see the problem now.
Furthermore, “kick”, “blacklist”, are harsh words, possibly due to a translation problem. I doubt the Japanese description of these features make it sound as physical as a kill-list.**
The end result is closed-ended logic, a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the means justify the means. It will result in what I posted before, the “give-in” mentality.

Prejudice-
I quote: “Every person has once in their life, trusted. To believe in and be prepared to devote their all to something/someone. But this point rarely results in actual finality, and more often than not life goes on. But we yearn for it, amongst many other things, and it is the ultimate goal of a game to allow us to relive, even if via an illusion, that feeling again.”
Good social atmosphere is akin to and negativity immunisation. (creativity, communication, economic prosperity and fairness, mindfulness). ***
Unfortunately, players do not trust each other. The game gleefullly provides their own NPCs for us to ‘trust’ instead. Vibrant and talented is the playerbase, but it is not integrated into the game well. Everything ‘community’ has to go through SE, while in-game mechanics are not particularly encouraging of inter-player community activity. ****
The failure to develop multiple social spheres, attempting to take everything into the game but failing (because immersion), then resulting in ‘push aside’ ways to deal with it such as ‘blacklist’.
Players wont develop a maturity without first be allowed to separate their social sphere from the in-game activity sphere. And in the impossibility of that, to separate the in-game social sphere into multiple thresholds. {*}
There has to be places, time, activities, which simply allow players to trust, or for some reprieve/partition from volatile influence. Currently this is almost nigh impossible, nigh inexistent, and not positive.

Perfection-
Continuing with the quotes, one about MMOs: “The human mind is not as adept at processing certain calculations as machines, but it excels at being simply ‘human’, providing a holistic awareness of an encompassing situation, and reacting with suitable complexity as a person. MMOs should seek to laterally engage players in all faculties of their emotional and logical minds, to let them simply ‘live’.”
An ideal game is not one which forces the player to make one cold decision after another, and every game is in the end, an RPG. Emotion, whimsical, liveliness, etc. this type of creative design the game and franchise does well, but not in a satisfactory way to invoke highest faculties, or be artistically significant. To have pillars, principles, which resonate with players and become part of the defining immersive atmosphere, part of the actual playstyle. (example, if your game’s content is about a clusterfudge of hobos going royale at each other, then that’s the level its ‘atmosphere’ will be.)
Good design in aesthetics of logic can function to naturally push players into a better social direction, but black spots will stand out more noticeably and be more impactful. One such black spot, as I perceive, is the current end-method of dealing with toxicity, almost a symbolic snapshot of everything bad,
to weigh on the mind. That’s why I describe it as “leaving a bad taste”, because few games need to encompass so much in this aspect, and have it concentrated so.

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I would like to write more on systems design, with future proofing and redundancy etc. Allowing for options almost unthinkable, like remittance. It’s all about designing logic, making systems, not individual features and mechanics.
Also more on the whimsical and artistic stuff, but maybe will (have purpose and clarity to) write someday else. Wrote way too much here.

But in the end, what has been written above I believe is a fair representation of my perspective and stance. And a bit of what I see out of this <blacklist> system, from my angle.

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*(If I may quote a recent suggestion, allowing receiving missed lockout rewards from the past week. It effectively turns the weekly lockout into a bi-weekly lockout, allowing more freedom and less pressure on players. And future possibility in new designs.)

** (Consider to change ‘vote kick’ to ‘vote dismiss’ and ‘blacklist’ to ‘block’. Or ‘ignore’. Change the perspective of the action, devolve the situational context of the action away from a hostile one.)

*** (Another recent suggestion of mine revolves around improvement of the glamour system to allow for more player creativity, fun, and less rigidity. Glamour is a large part of inter-player expression and less ‘stuck-up’ glamour is beneficial for a healthy in-game atmosphere. ‘Indirect’ methods of improvement, slipping in bits of positivity, improving the ‘infrastructure’ of the game, are equally important as direct solutions. Any problem cannot be considered in isolation from its broader context.)

**** (For instance, not much in mechanics to encourage low-organisation inter-player activity. Not even a floor-based carpet board-game furniture for FC events. No true FC activity design which actually involve FC members (airships? furniture? please) (I once suggested a botanical vaults feature, aka. tended instanced gardens).
Nothing in the game requires ‘human’ contact by principle. The raids are basically mechanical puzzles where players are chess pieces, and healers and tanks are tools, (ever wonder why so few healers), content more suited for machines than humans.

{*}(Project Titan from Blizzard as a revelation is significant, because perhaps Blizzard recognized the importance of multiple ‘social spheres’ and the affect it can have on a game. But perhaps they never fully theorized it, or failed to find a way to realistically implement it into a game. Or that the revelation itself was not significant enough on its own.)

(Some people have also posted that they don’t actually use blacklist that much, this can be interpreted in multiple ways from the function itself as being partially redundant, to most toxicity is not suitably addressable with this function or that there are more problems without the right tools.)

[Arillyn]

[B]
Prejudice-
Unfortunately, players do not trust each other. The game gleefullly provides their own NPCs for us to ‘trust’ instead. Vibrant and talented is the playerbase, but it is not integrated into the game well. Everything ‘community’ has to go through SE, while in-game mechanics are not particularly encouraging of inter-player community activity. ****
The failure to develop multiple social spheres, attempting to take everything into the game but failing (because immersion), then resulting in ‘push aside’ ways to deal with it such as ‘blacklist’.
Players wont develop a maturity without first be allowed to separate their social sphere from the in-game activity sphere. And in the impossibility of that, to separate the in-game social sphere into multiple thresholds. {*}
There has to be places, time, activities, which simply allow players to trust, or for some reprieve/partition from volatile influence. Currently this is almost nigh impossible, nigh inexistent, and not positive.

I may be misinterpreting this, I apologize if I am. But what I am getting from this is that in general the playerbase doesn't trust each other and we just blacklist people instead of trying to understand each other. That we need to be social in the game and work together. If I am interpreting this correctly I have to say that this game is very social. I have a very social FC and several ls's that I am in, and we do work together. We have a lot of fun together in the game. I also have fun with randoms that in the game too, if they feel like talking. Many don't though and sometimes I don't feel like talking to a bunch of randoms either if I'm just trying to get a roulette done. Being social in this game is on you (general you again) to find "your people". I don't have the desire nor responsibility to be social with people who are hostile and those are the people I put on my blacklist. As I stated before, I think I have maybe 5 people on my blacklist from all the years I have been playing this game. If you are on my blacklist you earned it.

I'm not sure where all the concern is coming from for the feelings of those who have been blacklisted. In most cases, those places on blacklists have been earned. I bet i'm on the blacklist of those who are on my blacklist. My feelings aren't hurt. Not everyone is going to get along in this game just like not everyone is going to get along irl. It's a valuable lesson to learn not to waste your precious time (relaxation time at that) with people that you just don't get along with.