Hello Tower Unite players. Hope you’re having a TUbular day .
We’ve gotten a number of reports concerning vote kicking and also we’ve seen issues being discussed in our Discord as well.
Vote kicking in Game Worlds is a useful tool that we added to prevent cheaters, exploiters, harassers, and other nasties from ruining your game experience.
We’ve brainstormed a few solutions to our current system and we’re wondering what you think.
Vote kicking feature can be disabled by the host upon hosting a server
Vote kicking feature can only be initiated by the host (a.k.a only the host can start a vote kick and players can then decide from there)
Disable vote kicking entirely and only the host can kick players
Vote kicking can only be initiated by players who have been in the server for more than 5 minutes (or some length of time)
Vote kicking should be moderated and users can be reported and banned from using vote kicking
0voters
You can vote on as many options you’d like us to work on / investigate into.
Thank you for your support and have a wonderful day.
The ability for the host to disable the feature before making a game makes the most sense to me. If they don’t want vote kicking to be a problem, might as well let them turn it off. It’d be a good idea to have some little icon denoting if a server has vote kicking enabled or not, too, just to be transparent on the server browser.
I like the idea of requiring players to be on for some length of time before initiating a vote kick, whether 5 minutes or even less than that. I’m not in tune with the vote kick issues others have had, so I don’t know if people joining and immediately starting a vote kick is a big problem or not.
Vote kick moderation seems nice to me, so I voted for it, but I do wonder if it is feasible to enforce. Chat logs are easy to pull up for chat violations, but I don’t know that a vote kick moderation system will be as successful unless it also has a robust enough system to prove that players are abusing the vote kick system. I don’t doubt that a system like this can be created (or even that the necessary system is already available), I just don’t know that it’s the best use of dev time right now. I’d say that the other two options I already mentioned are more worthwhile to pursue.
Host only vote kicking seems to defeat the point of a vote kick, especially if the host can already straight up kick players. When would the host initiate a vote kick if they can just immediately perform the desired result?
Disabling vote kicking seems a bit too extreme. There’s a reason it was added, and I think with other options being pursued (particularly the feature toggle option) this wouldn’t be the best change to make.
i like the idea of hosts being able to enable/disable it, but also ALWAYS have the option to manually kick someone from their game as the host.
it’s your game, you shouldn’t be forced to play with someone you don’t like if the others dont vote yes too.
Disagree with this.
Griefers who join for the sake of vote kicking others shouldn’t be able to see what servers they can do it on.
They should be forced to join, realize they can’t votekick others, and then leave. Waste the time of users who cause trouble for others.
Maybe only the host and those trusted (steam friends) can do vote kicking?
Obviously this option would be for games hosted through the main menu only.
Also allowing the host to vote kick someone doesn’t defeat the point if people still vote on it.
Say someone is being not nice, a player asks the host to vote kick them, then the server can decide if they are being not nice or not. Because maybe the host doesn’t personally care?
Independent of user choice, the host should be the ultimate ruler of the game. What is possible in the engine, the host should be able to do on a whim. After all, why would they want to keep hosting a game that’s not fun to them?
Even if I myself have made fun of “Make it toggleable” before, this seems like a case where allowing the host to create a custom experience would be a good idea. You could put some telemetry on that and science what options are the most commonly used with well working games to find a good default setting. So basically I vote: All of the above, depending on how the host sets up the game.
Eh, and waste a player slot and force other players to unknowingly play with a timebomb?
I doubt it’s a very long timebomb though.
If all they want to do is kick others from the game, I imagine they’d check if they could the moment they join, and then leave if they can’t.
People with malintent should not be granted the convenience of making their job easier.
I find it quite meta we are voting on vote kicking
I don’t really like any of these options substantially, to be honest. It’s possible for a single user to stall the vote long enough that the vote kick never resolves, allowing a buddy-system to emerge that renders either person invincible if they feel like. The only idea on this list that feels remotely valuable to me is options 1 and 4.
Second, most of the cases regarding votekick as I’ve seen arise from the fact that people starting a game via the Game Ports cannot set the lobby to private, meaning in order to keep out players they don’t want in their “private” game, they have to votekick them out. And to do that, they have to act fast before another player can potentially stall the vote, as mentioned above.
Being able to disable votekicking for anyone but the host would be a marvelous option, since that gives the host more control over the players they are housing and can pick and choose (with their friends) who should stay in the server. I also believe this feature should be toggleable while inside the actual game, so the host can act upon trolling and disable it when everyone is getting out of hand.
Votekicking or allowing the host to kick should both not be mutual. In general, one is worthless with the other, as this sort of centralizes around the fact that the one with the “power to kick” is either the host, or the players, who can also abuse said power. (A central topic.)
Moderating the act of abusing votekicking is more backend work possibly, and if so I fully oppose that, hands down. At least, right now.
Both should be in the game at the very least. For match-making worlds, it should naturally set itself to it, possibly limiting itself to a certain amount of time in game before it’s enabled. Community-hosted ones should have a setting with the same limitations, but maybe only hosts that have a certain milestone rank can host non-votekick games or something.
This is really hard to moderate without a literal neutral party watching over everything or some system with compromise, in my opinion.
I joined a few games where people tried to kick a person who wasn’t good at Mini Golf.
half of the people voted No.
And the one who wanted to kick the “not so good player” started saying.
“his bad, his wasting my time etc.”
And keeps trying to kick him/her every few minutes.
(I think there should be a option after a person tried to vote kick the same person 2times and failed." he cannot vote kick the same person anymore.)
Another game I was palying and I saw the person tried to vote kick was that he was 2nd and tried to get votes to kick no.1
And failed to do it because the others denied it.
When someone is AFK, <- Vote Kick. I can accept it.
When someone is harrasing/assulting/bullying Vote Kick. Is acceptable.
But when someone wants to be number 1 by kicking the best player, or because the person isn’t good at a game. Sorry, that person doesn’t deserve the “vote kick” at all.
So a report for those kind of people should be allowed.
Just had a game where someone just kept putting up a vote kick on people for no reason other than a laugh and I mean barely 1 second between vote kicking before a new one is up.
What if the Host has the power to disable someone from vote kicking after they have tried it 3 times. Then you get the idea of if the player is just trying to annoy other players or not.
If only the host can vote to kick people it could be abused.
If you had enough players without randos, you wouldn’t be using GamePorts. Vote kicking because you got a rando you didn’t like doesn’t seem like a good reason, unless that rando turned out to be a d*.
Getting real sick of the vote kick policy. Jumped into a public game that hadn’t started and got vote kicked immediately. Didn’t even have the chance to say, “Hello.” (Screenshots are just to show how little time passed, since there are no time stamps in global chat).
IMO hosting a publicly joinable game should be moderated if votekicking is enabled, it is their right to vote to kick, but also affects other peoples’ gaming system.
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