An Examination of "Vote to Kick"

[Fyrebrand]

I have seen tons of topics by people complaining about Duty Finder groups where a single troll/jerk/loser completely ruined it for everyone. Either they harassed/insulted the other players, went Away From Keyboard, or just plain weren't willing to cooperate.

And yet, when pleas come up for a feature that would allow random DF parties a Vote to Kick problem individuals, I still see a number of rather shallow objections or weak rationalizations against it. I see posters offering ridiculous, elaborate new mechanics that only solve very specific instances of problems that are dependent on particular scenarios (i.e. "If someone is AFK in a dungeon for several minutes, generate a super-powerful monster in the dungeon that kills them." Are you serious??) Apparently, some players out there seem to think Vote to Kick would be a purely bad thing? This is mind-boggling, to me. It's like saying "police brutality exists, therefore there should be no police." Are you kidding me!?

Please, let's have a civil and rational discourse about this Vote to Kick idea. And I am not talking about an irresponsible throw-away implementation tossed into the game without thought or precaution. Use your heads. How could this be put into FFXIV to make the game better, while combating and minimizing abuse? Let's consider the facts of the game, the reality of abuses that are already happening, and how we can neutralize problems in an efficient manner.

In my eye, Vote to Kick is the most efficient and effective way to address the maximum number of problems with Duty Finder. Below, I've compiled what I believe are the most relevant considerations of the feature, including problems it solves and some reasonable objections. Please feel free (I know you will) to contribute to the discussion. Am I way off? Are there benefits/failures that I haven't realized? Take the big picture into account!


Some of the problems we're facing in Duty Finder today:

- You get into a dungeon, only to find that one of your party members goes AFK (either from the outset, or some time later). He stands there, unresponsive at best, or verbally insulting and provoking you at worst. It already took you 30, 40, 50+ minutes to get in here -- if you leave, tack another 15 minute penalty on top of your next queue.

- A player can enter Castrum, and collect the reward for completion while sitting at the entrance doing nothing. Unless the other party members want to leave and re-queue, they must attempt to press on, letting this freeloading leech take advantage of the system.

- An obnoxious, selfish, rude, or otherwise toxic individual is making the dungeon unenjoyable for everybody. Nobody wants him there, and yet you are stuck with him. Since there is no way to remove this player from the group, eventually someone gets fed up and decides to "pay it back" by intentionally wiping the party and messing up the run on purpose. Now there's no chance for success, the whole group had their time completely wasted on stupid fighting, and whoever is mature enough to simply leave gets a "deserter" lockout penalty in the DF queue.

- For whatever reason, somebody decides to go. Rather than simply leave the party, they intentionally "disconnect." They are still technically "in" the party, so the party can't even attempt to find a replacement. Everyone is forced to leave, even if they want to continue.

- Tanks and Healers will drop an entire party simply because one individual is being a jerk. After all, you can't get rid of them and find someone else. Might as well cut your losses.

- The whole group is at the mercy of the lowest common denominator, be that a tank that rushes ahead without his party members and locks people out of the boss room, or a terribly unskilled/under-geared/uncooperative weak link. There's no pressure to be a team player, and it becomes merely a weighing of "How much can I tolerate the worst of us" VS "How much do I want to avoid the desertion penalty and re-queue time?"



Why is this happening?

- There is no way to remove a troll, and everybody knows it. Once things goes bad, they stay bad.

- Rather than afford a party the combined authority to vote on the expulsion of problem individuals, SE has instead given DF parties no defense whatsoever against any single player who feels like throwing a fit and completely wasting everybody's time.

- The sheer knowledge that there is no Kick function in DF is encouraging/inviting more trolls to abuse the game. If they knew there was a Kick waiting for them, far fewer would even try.

- There is a penalty for deserting the party, so rather than be the first to leave, players resort to sabotaging the party and creating an intolerable environment for everybody else.

- With no consequences for being rude/disrespectful/toxic, these people have no reason to change their attitude and will continue to push the limits of indecency.



Some of the fears surrounding potential Vote to Kick abuse, or arguments against it:

"Newbies or undergeared players will be kicked unfairly!"
- It's sad, but this may happen if you are unlucky and the vast majority of the party happen to be elitist arseholes. But from what I've been hearing of endgame, the alternative if you stick around is that they don't explain anything to you, they scream at you to skip cutscenes, they blame you for every wipe, call you names, charge ahead and lock you out of the boss fights, and pretty much give you the most miserable time you can have in a game. Do you really want force yourself into these groups?
- How about if players who have never completed the dungeon before can't be kicked? Do you think people who are completely fresh to the dungeon are the ones trolling? I seriously doubt it. And somebody can only be "new" once -- but trolls keep on trolling into eternity, as long as they can't be removed.

"Vote to Kick causes more problems than all the AFK players, trolls, etc."
- This is a tautology. Of course kick abuse is more of a problem than AFKs and trolls -- because those players get KICKED, and thus cease to be a problem. You might as well be complaining that modern medicine causes more problems than smallpox.

"When WoW introduced Vote to Kick, there were X number of forum posts complaining about it!"
- And yet, Blizzard saw fit to keep the feature in their game, and it remains a staple of many MMOs to this day.
- There will be some abuse of Vote to Kick, especially early on. The novelty of it will be enough to attract some measure of jerks and people willing to "prove" how broken it is by going out of their way to ruin the game. In my opinion, there is no reason to think this will last, nor will it surpass the destruction caused by the problems Duty Finder is currently plagued with.

"Pre-made groups will kick you out so they can let in their FC buddies."
- Yes, that is a danger, but it's still far less harmful and less common than the problems we have now, where all it takes to ruin the dungeon for everybody is a single individual. It's easy to blame the Kick feature itself when you're the one being victimized by abuse of it -- but in a system where the problem is the lack of something, it can be less clear-cut. Some of you seem to remember quite vividly when 7/8 jerks kicked you out of the party for a laugh -- and yet, you seem to easily forget that a Kick would have prevented that 1/8 from ruining the dungeon for everybody.
Edit: Scratch that -- replacements for a kicked party member should only be drawn from the random Duty Finder pool. Perhaps parties who were fully put together before entering the dungeon may manually pull in a friend or FC member as a replacement.




Some things to consider:

- Safeguards and restrictions can be built into the Kick system: no kicks during combat or after last boss, no kicks while loot is being rolled on, limit on # of kicks allowed, kick cooldown, and any number of things that smarter folks than I can tinker with.

- If there were a Vote to Kick, we could possibly increase the harshness of the "deserter" penalty, without fear of lone trolls using it as a weapon to taunt people with. This would discourage tanks and healers from hastily abandoning less-than-ideal parties early on. I've already seen a number of people suggesting a larger penalty for leaving, but this doesn't make sense as long as it is being used as a tool for trolls.

- Players who abuse the Kick function for griefing can be reported. While that may be difficult to prove in some circumstances, it is a heck of a lot easier than proving an intentional AFK, disconnect, or tank abandoning in the first minute because somebody is new.

- Please note that certain qualifications and prerequisites must always be satisfied before any abuse of "Vote to Kick" can even happen. For example, you need to get enough people on your side for the vote to pass, and in a random DF group that is highly unlikely unless it is well-deserved. Not only is the chance of abuse far more rare by necessity, but the damage it causes is naturally contained in fewer instances because the abusers are grouped together. Also, the consequences of their abuse negatively impact fewer victims per party.




TL;DR: Sorry, this isn't a TL;DR kind of topic. Don't make generalizations, or attack straw-man caricatures of what you think I said, without reading. But if you must speak up, please at least consider "Vote to Kick" like it's not just being thrown into the game by a total idiot who's never played in MMO in their life. Try to imagine how abuses of it could be prevented. If they can't be prevented, that's what I want to hear about.

[Fyrebrand]

There are simply far more people who would exercise their imagined 'right' to get rid of someone... than there are players who are willing to disrupt gameplay by going AFK.

How do you know that? Have you counted them all? Or is this just your subjective "feeling," based on what cases you've been involved in or read about? We can't compare guesses about the number of people who would do this or are willing to do that, but we can compare potential methods of abuse, and how easy it is to cause such abuse. If all it takes to ruin a dungeon is one player, and they can do it at the drop of a hat, I'd say that's pretty damn easy.
However, like I said, in order to abuse Vote to Kick you need to gather together enough like-minded people for the vote to pass. So, let's just say for the sake of argument, that there are "far more" people who would try to get rid of someone. In a party of 4, you need 3 for a Kick to pass. So, you'd need three times more people in order to needlessly abuse that system. In a party of 8, you'd need six or seven times the amount. And they all have to be in the same party, working together. Once again, please compare that to the one person that can ruin it for everybody, which is all that's required without any kind of Kick function.

any argument about the abuse that begins with 'Well its sad...' can rightly -- and more accurately -- be said about the situation that is causing the desire for this function in the first place.

No offence, but it is rather naive to think you can go through life without ever having to choose between the lesser of two evils. What you are effectively saying here is "Vote to Kick isn't perfectly immune to problems, therefore we should just stick with the status quo, whether it is working or not."
Yes, it's "sad" that a Vote to Kick is necessary, in the same way that it's "sad" that a police and fire department is necessary. But you don't point at inefficiency and abuse in the police and fire departments and say "Well, we can say either way is sad, so we might as well just stick with anarchy and out of control fires."
It's not about finding a perfect solution, it's about finding a solution that strikes a balance between solving the most problems and suffering the least abuses.

I think the superior answer is for SE to name AFK'ing and assorted frippery as 'disruptive to gameplay' and enforce the Code of Conduct on it, up to and including permabans.

Trolling, griefing, insults, and otherwise being intentionally disruptive to gameplay, are already against the rules. It's against the rules of basically every MMO in the world, and it doesn't stop anyone. AFK can't even be proven to be intentional; there's no way it will be punishable with a ban.

All of the things you bring up as problems that warrant vote kick are things that are inherent problems with cross-server party formation tools. You don't have to worry or care about your reputation on the server, so people act like asshats.

Right, but just because the problem is inherent to the system doesn't mean it can't be combated and minimized. Perhaps speeding and traffic accidents are inherent to a society where people own motor vehicles -- that doesn't mean we just throw up our hands and say "Well, it can't be helped!"
For example: you enter a dungeon via Duty Finder. One idiot starts cursing everybody out, intentionally wiping the group, then just stands there and refuses to leave the dungeon so the rest of you can't progress and must leave. So, the rest of you put it to a vote, and you boot that loser out of the group so a decent player can join for the remainder. There you have it -- a problem inherent to the system, solved.
That jerk may or may not go on to continue this sort of behaviour, but at least his impact on your group has been ground to a halt, and it didn't waste all the time you queued to get here. Even setting aside the issue of a Vote to Kick, if some jerk starts harassing at any point in the game, do you just accept it as "inherent" to the internet? No, you probably blacklist and report the guy for his behaviour. These trolls are individuals acting of their own will, they aren't "inherent" to anything.

one fear is absolutely valid, based on past history, which is that people will become hypersensitive to the point that newbies to dungeons will become almost unable to use the duty finder to run said dungeons - they'll have to pre-form groups to learn the dungeon to avoid getting kicked for not knowing what to do. Again, we've seen that exact problem in every game that's implemented a vote kick feature.

A valid concern, for sure. It would probably be necessary to protect new players from kicks. Anyone who hasn't completed the dungeon at least once is unkickable.
See, this is the kind of response I was hoping for. It seems that 95% of people opposed to a vote-kick feature will just pop in and say "No, kick will be abused" and don't given any specific examples of those abuses they think will happen. As long as SE is aware of the kinds of abuses that are possible, and they build protection against that into their system, then we can have a feature that will significantly improve DF from what it currently is.

[Lissyl]

There are simply far more people who would exercise their imagined 'right' to get rid of someone -- anyone -- for some reason than there are players who are willing to disrupt gameplay by going AFK. There is no way around that. As such, any argument about the abuse that begins with 'Well its sad...' can rightly -- and more accurately -- be said about the situation that is causing the desire for this function in the first place.

I think the superior answer is for SE to name AFK'ing and assorted frippery as 'disruptive to gameplay' and enforce the Code of Conduct on it, up to and including permabans. There is simply no way to insert a Vote to Kick that isn't sufficiently safeguarded against abuse.

[Warlyx]

Ppl are afraid of vote kick because ppl will abuse it.

guess what? ppl are using the no kick option to abuse now ....

A vote to kick wont save 3 elitist from kicking 1 player , but will save 3 new players for being harrassed by 1 elitist tank for example.

Kick isnt only a solution to a problem , is a prevention measure....w/o kick ppl can go and abuse or go afk, but if kick was implemented that same ppl wont abuse or go afk in partys anymore because they are afraid of being kicked.

SE can always put a timer, 1 kick every 24h ? , ppl will dont kick new players and waste the kick afraid of getting an afk later on

[Xmbei]

I posted a bit of this in another DF topic but my idea for vote to kick option:
All party members get the ability to register a kick ticket on a player, when 2 (4pp) or 3 (8pp) are on one person a window pops up for all members in party for vote to kick. If 3/4 or 6/8 vote to kick the player will be kicked. Also in this window for a "Yes" vote it will ask reason for kick, like a 3-4 point selection each with a punishment time assigned to it.
1: harassment: 1 hr delay
2: afk: 30 min delay
3: problematic to progression: 15 min
4: (other): no delay

The vote is then tallied and the number one reason voted in Gets applied! If the harassment or afk is the top reason a report gets automatically filed to SE for review! If it comes up as a flagged harassment on a new player getting kicked, a delay will be applied to those people for 2 hrs for wasting players and SE's time.

[Flarestar]

:snip:

All of the things you bring up as problems that warrant vote kick are things that are inherent problems with cross-server party formation tools. You don't have to worry or care about your reputation on the server, so people act like asshats. We've seen the exact same behavior happen in every game that's implemented it, and even to a lesser extent in games that have done server-only party queues.

That being said, one fear is absolutely valid, based on past history, which is that people will become hypersensitive to the point that newbies to dungeons will become almost unable to use the duty finder to run said dungeons - they'll have to pre-form groups to learn the dungeon to avoid getting kicked for not knowing what to do. Again, we've seen that exact problem in every game that's implemented a vote kick feature.

You can talk about the difference in communities as much as you like, but for the most part, this IS the same community that played most of the other games.

[Kitsu]

I agree completely with the OP.

I am sick and tired of exploiters AFKing in dungeons while the rest of us work for it.

SE, Please take immediate action on this issue like any other exploit.

[gorror]

Honestly i don't see what all the fuss is about, i played wow hard core since launch (until this game came along) and have only ever been vote kicked ONCE since the dungeon finder was implemented, and can count on one hand the amount of people that have been vote kicked from my groups. Seems a lot of people have a lot of fears that are pretty uncommon, i haven't ran into a single bad egg in an instance yet but i am only level 26.

[OrganizationXIll]

I think Vote to kick is a great idea. I think it should be implemented tomorrow with the following stipulations.

1) You have to have 75% of the votes. If its a four man dungeon it has to be unanimous; in an eight man, 6 out of the 8 are required.
2) New players cannot be kicked no matter what. Their name doesn't appear in the kick list.
3) You only get 3 kicks a day. That way it limits what the elitist will vote for.
4) If you get kicked you are warned. Twice in a day you are locked for 15 minutes. Three times an hour. On the fourth time you are locked out until a set time per region. (EX: 8:00 am PST)
5) If you kick someone you have the option to leave a highly censored message 25 characters or less that are visible on the Duty Finder screen of the kicked player until a check box is marked. Any locked out time (see above) doesn't start until this check box is checked.

[Rialle]

There are valid arguments both for and against "vote to kick." I have seen both sides of the coin, though overall my experiences with such features is positive. The overwhelming majority of the time I've needed to utilize this type of thing in other games, it was to kick an obviously AFK player.