As @macdguy already mentioned, we’ll be discussing this internally on Monday, but I had a couple thoughts to share as well.
Keep in mind, these are all my personal opinions, and should not and cannot be taken as an official statement from the team or any indication of any future plans or changes the team may make. Literally, this is just my 2 cents.
I don’t have a particular formula for this, so I’ll just go down the thread and respond where I can.
One of the points brought up in the OP is that there isn’t a clear way to report users in the Discord.
In the #info-rules channel, there is a section on how to report Discord users, but I will agree, it’s smashed in the middle of a bunch of text, and the #support channel’s instructions make no mention of reporting Discord users, only information on reporting players in Tower Unite.
Worse, because of the instructions on the #support channel, it does say not to use the Discord ticket system for reporting users, in contradiction to the #info-rules instructions on reporting Discord users.
These are definitely things that can be improved, as well as the guidelines for @ing developers vs moderators.
Another point in the OP has to do with reporting tools.
Every chat message sent via Global Chat (which is broken for now but will be coming back) and the Plaza are logged, and timestamped. This is information we have that isn’t required by the player to provide.
That being said, video and audio are required for anything requiring voice chat, it’s just the nature of things. It’d be a huge technical hurdle alone to automatically collect and store this information, and there are countless tools available that allow retrieving the last X minutes of gameplay in order to create a report. Primitive I know, but other than a handful of AAA games, I don’t really know of a solution around that.
As far as player reporting is concerned, I’d argue our current system is very simple (if not a bit clunky by it opening the In-Game Steam window). The in-game rules are on a board on the plaza and even more detail is found here on the forums (which is linked by the report page).
We detail the exact evidence we need for specific offense, and provide ways to link to that additional evidence.
The point is correct that once the report is submitted, that’s the end of the story as far as the player making the report is concerned. There is no way for the player to see if their report has either resulted in a ban or not. I totally understand how this can create the perception that the report didn’t matter.
Another point brought up in both the OP and subsequent posts are the idea of community moderators, and the point seems mainly focused on the Discord, but my opinion also would apply to Tower Unite moderation as well.
This is something that could get hairy fast, and would take a bunch of time to sort out. It’s not something as simple as “vetting” someone for an hour or so. You’d need to make sure they’re fully aware of the rules, our guidelines, AND we’d have to verify and moderate their decisions, because now, they’re speaking and moderating for us.
So sure, once a few vetted members are found, in theory the work of moderation is offloaded to them, but that’s not entirely the case, as we’d still need to watch over them, and in that case, might as well just handle moderation ourselves.
Plus as mentioned, we already handle moderation on top of developing two games, adding yet another step of vetting, training, and watching over community moderators would only cause bigger headaches IMO.
Final Thoughts
There are a bunch of amazing people in this community, making all sorts of crazy and wacky condos, workshop models, just doing things that I could have never imagined possible using the tools that we’ve given. Not just in-game either, even art created about Tower outside of the game, animations over the years, cute little catsacks, achievement icons. I always smile when I see these things.
All of us here at PixelTail Games, we love Tower Unite. Not only is it our full time job, but it’s been a passion project for many of use for 10 years now, and for some even longer, the OG GMod Tower crew.
That passion and love for Tower Unite is also evident in this community, even in this thread and the threads that predate it. To sit and write threads like these, to take the time to do it, shows that passion.
Because of this, it can come off as hurtful when I see comments and accusations that we don’t care about this game, or its community. Sure, it’s expected, especially when developing a large project like this, but it doesn’t make it any less degrading throughout the years, especially when I know first hand the time spent discussing ideas and developing tools and systems to make the game better.
That’s not to say that there can’t be criticism. There totally can, and there’s a bunch of valid ones in this thread alone. It’s just the way it’s presented a lot of the time. It’s one thing to point out flaws or issues with the current moderation scheme, or how the Discord is handled, etc. It’s another to issue the challenge that we don’t care.
