Our staff is on break until Tuesday as Monday is a public holiday, but I’ll try to address as many concerns as I can here.
We all want Tower to be a safe place. It’s not acceptable in anyway when a user continuously harasses players. That’s one of the reasons we have a zero tolerance ban policy regarding racism, transphobia, homophobia, anti-semitism, and any other forms of discrimination.
There’s a few topics here I’d like to directly address.
We’re a small team, we’re doing our best when it comes to moderation and we handle reports all throughout the day, but we don’t have activate moderators other than staff right now.
We average around 6-10 reports a day, which is down from previous times where it could be an average of 40 reports a day. Lots of reports of voice without evidence which unfortunately have to get thrown out, but remain on record. However, sometimes we’ll issue out a temp ban as a warning to the user.
I have not seen a report about players using player models that crash lobbies in about a year or two. We have a workshop model report form here if you know of a model that causes issues: Workshop Report Form
Script exploits have in the past occurred, but we’ve been tackling them as quickly as possible and many of the exploits that have been used are no longer possible. This of course is an ongoing process, and will always be addressed as quickly as possible. For obvious reasons we address these issues silently. If there’s more information you here in this area, please feel free to email bans@pixeltail.com
Cheating scores is a difficult problem to completely resolve, as cheating can come in many forms, but most cheaters will get VAC banned. We actively remove and manage leaderboard entries quite often. We get about 3-4 reports weekly and the users who cheat get permanently banned from leaderboards and their scores wiped. Reporting a cheated leaderboard score should be done using the in-game report tool or email.
Targeted harassment is handled from player reports and email, and we issue out bans as best as we can. Sometimes we’ll get reports of harassment and there’s no evidence or chat logs to go off of. We have a mod email for more complex issues which factor in. We have a policy where repeat offenders get issued longer or permanent bans, so please send in a report if you need to. Contrary to what people have stated here, we may take action of events “outside of Tower”, should there be sufficient evidence, but we highly suggest reporting them on those platforms themselves. The reason we have discussed about events outside of Tower not always being actionable is because they could be manipulated by tools, where as our own chat logs cannot.
We don’t feel comfortable opening up our Discord to report tickets right now, but that could change in the future if we can figure out a way that works best for both us and players. We have a mod email setup for when users need to add context or explain a situation better.
We do have systems behind the scenes that check players for certain exclusive items, such as the Supporter pack. There’s more work being done on these systems as we speak.
This is several years ago and this has never been our policy. Socks has not been a moderator for several years now.
We don’t want you to publicly report issues. We request that you use our email and the in-game report system. We don’t want users using the support ticket for reports.
Was this reported? I’ve not seen any reports of this nature. Do you know what causes the crash, who is doing it, etc. If you can, email us.
Was this reported? There’s nothing on it in our email or the in-game report tool.
We’ve updated our policy on this about a year ago. Users who harass in condos can get banned, but we need evidence as Condo chat is not logged. We’ve issued out bans already for conduct in Condos.
We acted on this issue immediately behind the scenes. We are still investigating. However, we found no third party script or command that can crash Plaza servers and chat messages cannot take down the AGC. It’s more likely that it’s a bug in the game code and we’re actively finding it. A short ban like that was issued as a preempted measure & warning so we can investigate the situation fully.
I know I haven’t addressed every concern here, but I’m actively trying to.
In general, what helps us the most to tackle these issues is:
- Using in-game report tools. These get logged immediately and let us investigate the situation as quick as possible.
- Taking screenshots of bad behavior in Condos.
- Taking screenshots of text hats (currently they are not logged).
- Recording voice for evidence of rule breaking behavior.
- Sending us emails to bans@pixeltail.com to help combat harassment.
- Reporting outside of Tower harassment to the proper platforms.
Also,
- Please do not communicate with a user you’ve reported, if they’ve been reported already, then let us handle the situation. In many cases, reporting then blocking the user is advised
- It is totally fine to bump an email asking for more assistance or an update on the situation. Oftentimes we take action and don’t always reply to the email, which is something we’re working on
- Ensure you give us all the evidence you can, we need evidence so when we issue out bans we have evidence to back up the claim. Also double check the attachment or link is functional.
- Don’t assume short bans aren’t serious infractions. A short ban is still a ban & confirmation that the behavior needs to stop. Bans are on permanent record and will vastly influence future moderation action. A short ban is generally a warning, the next ban is longer or permanent.
I’ve also noticed that many reports recently have been using Discord image links - please do not use those as they expire now.
I value all of this feedback greatly and will discuss this more with the team. We’ll continue to improve on our rules and look into better ways to handle moderation to make Tower a safer place each day.