Here’s a slight change to moderation policy: we’re completely moving away from applying mutes for now and we’re replacing them with suspensions. This is due to technical limitations of the Spring protocol - hopefully in the future the Tachyon protocol will allow us to go back to them. Read more if you’re curious about it!

Why mutes are bad

In the recently posted moderation guide, we said this:

Moderation is usually based on a “correspondence” principle - if someone chooses to abuse other players via in-game chat, their ability to chat can be removed. If they abuse boss mode, or make spurious reports, their corresponding permissions can be taken away. Finally, login suspensions are used in cases where people abuse others via their in-game actions, such as griefing - and in place of longer mutes, for technical reasons.

Let’s dig into those technical reasons for a bit. Note that this is all “to my current understanding” and may change in the future as more knowledgeable people point things out to me. After all, there is no faster way to learn things on the internet than to post a technically incorrect explanation.

Pings, shares, and votes

BAR runs on the Recoil engine, which is a fork of the Spring engine - and also uses the legacy Spring networking protocol. In practice, this means that a lot of information is passed over chat messages. This is seen both in the lobby - with commands such as !map Supreme or !balance - and in the actual game. Whenever you ping, the “Look here!” message is pretty much a chat message with coordinates. Whenever you share a unit or resources, along with the share, a message along the lines of “Perfi has sent you 1 unit” appears. I don’t quite know how, but apparently drawing is also implemented by a variant of a ping with coordinates.

Now, suppose something interfered with your ability to send those messages?

• you would still be able to send units, but nobody would realize you’re doing that.
• you would not be able to ask someone to send you a T2 constructor unless you did some crazy stuff that’s often worse than not asking.
• you would be able to pay for a T2 con, but the person receiving the metal would not immediately know who sent it unless they know how mutes work.

All of these are pretty crippling from a cooperation perspective. What’s worse, having a muted player on your team is a punishment even if you yourself haven’t broken the code of conduct. Thus, for a while now we’ve had a rule that long mutes are to be avoided, and I don’t recall the last time we gave someone one longer than 3 days - that’s still not great for other players, but we thought the benefits - letting muted people play a bit, at least, outweighed the costs. I personally liked the “correspondence” of mutes as a response to chat infractions and swept the rest under the rug.

… what about those votes, though?

However, like I said, a mute also applies to the lobby. This means a player cannot, for example, vote “yes” on a map vote. We thought that was an acceptable compromise - you can’t expect a perfectly fine experience when you’re muted.

This also means a player cannot vote “yes” on a start vote. That’s… kinda sorta fine, not great, but there’s usually a lot of other players who can vote “yes” and get the game started.

Until you consider what happens in a 1v1 setting.

!cv start
* 2 users allowed to vote.
!vote y
!vote y    <--- with="" a="" mute,="" this="" won't="" happen!<="" code="">

Unless there’s a boss in place, you need two votes to agree on starting a 1v1 game. If one of those players is muted, they’re effectively soft-locked out of 1v1.

And that’s just the final straw, and this made us finally give up on mutes as they are.

Policy change

Thus, given that the current implementation of mutes doesn’t really work from the “correspondence principle” standpoint, leaking into multiple other areas of the game than just chat, let’s just get rid of them. Effective immediately we’re replacing future mutes with (possibly shorter, though that’s TBD) suspensions.

Towards a better mute

In the future, what I’d like to see is a mute that:

• blocks chat and chat only
• allows pings, possibly with a rate limit
• allows a selection of pre-approved messages via Errrrrrr’s wonderful Ping Wheel widget. Beherith’s already said it’ll be making its way to the base game, but we need to figure out a good way of making it internationalization-friendly first.
• allows sharing resources and units, with the messages about it still in place
• allows votes
• allows drawing - if someone draws hate symbols as per CoC B6, we’ll just suspend them. Hopefully the Tachyon protocol we’re hoping to replace the legacy Spring protocol with, and some other improvements to the overall infrastructure of BAR, will allow it in the future!