Player reports are a big part of fighting cheating and toxic behavior in-game, but also player reports aren’t always as reliable. I have had few things to say about this for a while now, but the FAIR.PUBG post by the devs is a good kickoff for this discussion. Original post here: FAIR.PUBG: Report System Improvement
Cheating
Different people have different criteria for reporting someone and some even report just about everyone they get killed by. False reports on accounts can cause false bans and in some cases legit people to leave the game. Also, pro players and other partnered players getting banned and using alt accounts on stream creates a culture of ban evasion being ok and takes trust away from the anti-cheat process.
Player reports should be taken seriously, but honestly, I think we need a reporter rating system in the background. This doesn’t need to be shown to players, but there needs to be one. The number of reports and report-to-permaban ratio should affect the reporter’s trust rating. Even a temp ban should take more reports from accounts that keep reporting everyone, but also reporters that keep reporting only people that end up getting permabanned should be trusted more, even if it only means priority in the review queue.
Toxicity
Racial, homophobic, and other insulting slurs are unfortunately common on voice coms. Yes, we can turn off the voice coms, but that seems like giving the offenders a free pass.
PUBG Shield was an attempt on creating a system to fight this, but it had its problems. Players had to record gameplay separately, pinpointing the person talking especially in team modes was nearly impossible and then some faked video evidence.
For a system that actually works fighting the toxicity, there has to be one major change in the game. The voice coms you hear (and talk) have to be recorded into replay files. I do understand that it’s technically challenging, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need it. With the coms on replay, there is no question about what was said and exactly 100% who said it. It changes reporting totally.
This might be controversial, but I don’t think totally banning people for toxic behavior is the right way to go. Especially now that the game is free to play. Instead, I would suggest blocking these people from using in-game voice coms and adding a notice on their profile (visible on friendslist), for a month 1st time and going up from that for repeats ending up in an account ban after repeat infractions. This should also include people with toxic usernames.
I honestly think the social pressure from that notice and wanting to keep the items on the account does more than when they already know it’s a throwaway account and they will have to make a new one. I understand that there is no changing some people, but maybe some.
