A plea to PixelTail

Both Pixels and EvKem summed up my points up very well.
Nobody here is saying to give mod powers to literally anyone - when you give moderator to anyone, you screen them first in the same way any big healthy community would. You vet them before you open the cage.

The core issue for me, and many others posting here, is that it’s still entirely on the devs to moderate their own community - to the point where the lead developer has to personally step in, even while he’s on his break. I’ll reiterate that it’s not sustainable for the devs or the players who rely on moderators to ensure peace and safety is consistent in the community.

I’ve said this a few times now, so please don’t try to twist what I’m saying into something I’m not asking for. It’s something I’ve noticed while reading the replies in this thread.

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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.

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Thanks for your genuinely insightful and candid response Sabrina, I’m super glad you’re willing to show your personal perspective on the issues I’ve raised in this thread, it truly means a lot.

I completely do agree with you on the report form clarity, the conflicting info between #info-rules and #/support, and the visibility of tools - I’m pretty glad to hear those points are acknowledged and will be discussed soon.

I do want to gently push back on one point though - about the oversight of trusted community moderators. I fully understand that training and vetting does take a fair bit of effort, and that the dev team still want oversight. But my core point is that the current day-to-day moderation burden should not rest entirely on the developers - even with the said oversight in place.

Most communities for social games like this balance things by empowereing a few vetted, visible people to help share the load. (And as others have made clear, there are already a few people in this thread who would be willing to help with moderation experience)

Yes, they represent you, PixelTail and the game - but they do so within the rules and guidelines that you have set and oversee. It’s about freeing up some dev time and building trust and faster response times, so one person doesn’t feel pressured to step in during big updates or planned breaks.

My posts in this thread were never meant to be seen as antagonistic - and I absolutely don’t doubt you and the team care about Tower Unite as much as the community. But as my thread demonstrates, the process of communication and transparency around moderation really does need more straightening - not just a passion for the game and good intentions.

Thank you again for the thoughtful reply Sabrina - I really hope my angle to this makes better sense to you. :slight_smile:

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Personally I just want VR to be done and to a great extent.

However on the side of the player base. I see lack of advertising, the player base feels like it’s shrinking. I know I’m new here but I feel something isn’t right and it’s honestly a decent social game.

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You are definitely spot on Rose - and it’s one of the reasons why I brought these points up in my initial post in this thread, that a social game really thrives on gaining word of mouth and good player retention, and that can only happen when they feel safe, listened to and protected. My initial post mentioned that advertising on social media is something that should be key, rather than an after thought.

I am looking forward to VR as well, I feel that it will bring players back somewhat, but it should be as important to make sure that the community that either returns or joins for the very first time actually feel like they are actually heard to. So it doesn’t sound right when a player, like yourself who has started playing the game, starts noticing issues from other players.

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This came on to my table earlier in the week, and I wanted to give it some time to see how the discussion evolved before chiming in when I had a day off to share my thoughts. I’m going to be bouncing around with a couple thoughts that I had in addition to any discrepancies found with certain statements being made. There’s no particular order I’d like to address things in, so I’ll do my best to organize this post in a more coherent manner.

Keep in mind, any of the thoughts that I share here are just my opinion based on my own experiences. I’m in no way trying to bash anyone here.


Prior to 2025-07-06T03:05:00Z, there was no mention of using a support ticket for reporting users. In fact, the original message prior to the most recent edit had suggested to use the bans@pixeltail.com email address, and this reflects my unedited comment I made in the #public channel on 2025-07-01T00:32:00Z. You can see a screenshot of that comment here below and click the image if you’d like to jump to it using the message link for it.

Comments made in the #public channel

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While I imagine this update may have been discussed during Monday’s meeting, I wanted to highlight it because changes like this, when not clearly communicated, can unintentionally create confusion or frustration. At times, it feels like silent changes like these are made as a reaction as opposed to a proactive effort to make it easier for both the community and the team responsible for handling issues within the community.


One thing I noticed right away was what appeared to be an immediate contradiction that happened within this thread, though I may be misunderstanding these posts.

On 2025-07-04T01:33:00Z, there was a claim below stating that an email had not been sent to the bans@pixeltail.com address for over two months now. In addition, any other emails that had been sent to the addressed have either been handled or discussed.

Contrary to the above, I had sent a report via the email as per the original instructions found in the #info-rules channel on 2025-06-27T06:52:00Z. Within that email, it contained a detailed yet concise section labeled as Report Information with a description containing only 626 characters, or 95 words, only slightly going above what would be the maximum length of a description in a Tower Unite In-Game/Web Report by 126 characters.

The email continues after the aforementioned Report Information with a lengthy “Soapbox” that I had referenced in the initial opening two sentences to set expectations of what can be found within the email that was sent. While this soapbox is SIGNIFICANTLY longer than the introductory sentences and report information combined, the entire email was also summarized in a conveniently placed TL;DR at the end of the email. One of the bullet points even stating the following:

Information necessary for any kind of infraction is available in the “Report Information” section.

Theoretically, one could just skip the entire soapbox and see the content that violates the community’s rules at the beginning of the email and just call it a day. However, I am a bit thankful that there may have been time put into reading and understanding where my frustrations were coming from as a result of waiting on a reply with the soapbox. However, it has been 12 days since that email had been received according to the automated reply that I received at 2025-06-27T06:55:00Z, and there has been no infraction given to either of the users that I had reported. If further discussion has been ongoing, I’d appreciate any updates that can be shared, even if brief. However, I’ve also watched said members within my report commit the same unacceptable acts to other members of the community since I had originally reported them.

It’s easy to see how someone might feel unheard in this situation. At times, it can feel pointless because there is nothing that tells us if something happened to another individual or not. Even something as simple as a notification following up to say, “This is still being reviewed, thank you for your report,” would go a long way as it shows the reporter that the message didn’t fall on to deaf ears. As for in-game reports, it’d be nice if a little pop-up appears saying something along the lines of

A player you reported had received actions. Thank you for helping keep our community safe.

These are just some suggestions, but I’m sure there’s another way you can approach it too.


The OP mentions having community moderators within the Discord, and I think that should also extend in-game as well.

I agree that it can get hairy really fast. However, I also believe that an investment in community moderators that are passionate for the game enough to not only protect it but also promote/represent the game with their presence is well worth any trials and tribulations one might experience as a team focusing on many different areas of the company at once.

If any community moderators were to exist, they would need to be dedicated people who are both passionate about Tower Unite itself and willing to serve the community without any preexisting internal biases they may have for others within the community. If I were to pick maybe 3 moderators offhand, it’d definitely be people like @GateTheCat, @Plasma, and @Mid as any new person I’ve met on Tower Unite always talks about how these individuals not only introduced them to the Tower Unite experience I once fell in love with, but also proactively gave them the resources they needed to protect themselves in a clearer manner before an issue had arised—if not, just the former. The best part being that each of them are in different time zones, so they can handle different regions of the Tower Unite community both in and out of the game itself. Obviously, you don’t have to take my suggestion with the named individuals, but I can understand the concern when it comes to having community moderators in general however—both the struggles and the desires to have moderators.


Final Thoughts

I’ve talked about this a lot extensively before, so I don’t feel the need to keep repeating myself with how I feel on a lot. I am just glad that some people can relate on the sentiments I have shared before. Hopefully, reporting users on the Tower Unite Discord can be a little bit better going forward with these new changes. I just hope there’s going to be a notification in the future stating that action was taken when reporting those in-game.

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Thanks for laying it out and showing your experience with reporting, Kirbyrocket.

I really hope this demonstrates why I feel like it isn’t just about clarifying rules but about building a more robust system where reports aren’t buried and players aren’t left wondering if their main concerns in the game truly matter. While some of my points were taken in the Discord, namely the mention of Tower Unite moderators and #info-rules being updated to indicate the new methods of reporting, Kirbyrocket does still mention that certain members in the community have still continued to cause strife with other members of the community, while the systems have changed and such hasn’t been directly communicated to members like the aforementioned.

Small changes to Tower Unite’s Discord is a fair step in the right direction, but the game itself and overall communication needs better ways of informing players of infractions and other forms of warnings / bans. Maybe as the player logs on, a message is sent that informs them of what actions were taken, something which was already mentioned in their reply. As well as that, I massively agree that having moderators on different sides of the world means that it doesn’t matter which time or place a player resides in, their report is taken promptly rather than only being seen during US hours.

Again, I welcome more discussion in how this can be done, even if it retrudges on previous points already discussed and mentioned.

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I’m gonna lock this thread and go over what we plan to do based on the suggestions received.

We are discontinuing bans@pixeltail.com. This was an old format of reporting and it’s no longer recommended or active as of now.

We’ll be updating our guidelines on how to make Discord reports separate from support tickets.

We’ll be updating our Discord rules to ensure they’re in sync with our new policies.

We have updated our rules and reporting player guides to point to the new online form, which is what we require you to use in the future.

We updated and clarified our condo content rules.

We will be updating our website to provide easier links to reporting players and behavior in the game.

We plan to add a feature that displays recently previously expired bans to players who did not see their ban before it expired.

We will be continuing to discuss ways to improve moderation and reporting.

A couple other comments:

  • We have no plans to hire community moderators at this time, and if that changes it would be with trusted moderation staff, not volunteer moderators from the community.
  • We don’t want to create a toxic report environment, so we have no plans to inform players if a player you have reported had received actions on their account.

Any future suggestions for Discord, in-game Moderation, or other similar miscellaneous topics should be posted in Suggestions.

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