Assuming people give their real names. Since there is no actual way for the game company to check, a bully might pick his "victim's" name, then act even more obnoxiously than usual and get double the kicks out of it.

Look - I never said this system was going to work. I merely stated what I THINK was its intended purpose, that's all.

..and I think you thought it correctly, but I also think that the people who thought it up didn't think it through. :p

To recover an hacked B.net account you might be asked to provide personal data and a scan of your ID, so I'd guess most people are actually using their real name.

Yes, but for that to have any weight, the person needs to care about the account. If I wanted to buy a Starcraft 2 copy just to make someone else look bad, I wouldn't worry too much about the account getting hacked.

Banning has always worked in the past.

For those who store credit card info, you just tie someone's communication privileges with their credit card and if they don't play nice, ban them.

If they want to spam some more, they need to get a new credit card. How many credit card can you get?

For those who don't store credit card info, you can limit communication privilege to paying customers (in which case they have to create a new account and pay again if they get banned... makes you reconsider when you have to fork in money every time you bully someone).

And yes, I suppose you can limit communication privileges to in-game achievements (as stated in the video) as a last resort though I'd say make the achievements time consuming but trivial (ex: played 10 games to conclusion without resigning).

And yes, while there genuine home grown biggots, I believe that the vast majority of people who post these things are teenagers so I wouldn't lose faith in humanity over it.

If you have a good system in place, you just need to ban them between 1 and 2 times on average.

You don't have to peruse to everything being written.

You can have a report system (which you can limit to a couple of trusted users if you receive too much garbage) and can combine it with a basic pattern recognition filter that automatically flags some posts for revision. You may want to put the profanity in the middle, not at the end, because otherwise, people who scroll down to look at the next post will see it.

I got down-repped. Hahahah!

Seriously? :D No, the community is hostile to new players who play ranked matches in teams. They should expect to be harassed if they don't perform up to the level required. There are practice matches in all games in which you can better, if team play is in question.

About the other part, I honestly don't give a crap if anybody uses harsh terms / words / whatever.

If you have a problem with other people talking trash, they aren't the problem, you are, because you're taking their shit to heart. Seriously, this is teh intermetz! I am, always. But some games do not allow you to choose your enemy in matchmaking. I certainly don't care if the enemy has hard time having fun being obliterated by my mighty Void Rays.

If it's a ladder or an ELO system and you're in the fucking middle and suck enough to be paired with the new blood it's too damned bad if you have to play with the noobs. Get good enough to ladder out of their games or stfu, imo:)

Pretty much, society gets what it wants at the expense of a minority group. The problem tends to be that there's often not a good reason for it. But, sometimes there is, there's no good reason to allow people to marry their close blood relatives and many reasons not to that are backed by quality science.

You know, I used to believe this too, about government at least (I know, you may find this hard to believe). Eventually I decided I was wrong and here's why: I'm not old enough to remember the days back before the problem was starting to be addressed, in most cases. My suspicion is that it sucked and was way more unfair in many more circumstances than I can imagine. So, let's take integration, that's what we're really talking about in the US when this comes up, after all. Oh I know there's other examples, but that's the big one lurking in the background in literally every conversation about this.

All the insane fuckups, the busing that makes no sense, the affirmative action that seems to backfire in some cases (especially for white males in college, ironically, this is still about the only time it backfires for said group), we only hear about the fuckups. The fact that it's always in "Chicago" or at "IBM" or "the bank down the street" actually kind of indicates it's working. Our perception is that it doesn't work, but we only notice in it when it's not working, we notice the exceptional circumstance, not the normal one.

Take your most loathed government agency, same damned thing, you piss and moan about the NEA (or whatever you hate), I piss and moan about my pet peeve, but you know what? I have really safe roads to drive on, safe cars, clean drinking water, no "out of fuel" signs at the gas station, the government satellites are still feeding the weather feeds on my phone (and the evening news), there's still big and small game to hunt, our national and state parks remain incredibly clean and nice places to visit (remember, Yellowstone had tons of trash thrown in the geysers when the government took over management and declared it the first national park). The list goes on.

It's the reverse of confirmation bias... I think... fuck, I'm not sure what to call it. I do know that it happens, even very clever people seem extremely susceptible to it.

So no, I don't believe the government nor private industry will automatically fuck this up or that the cure will be worse than the disease.

We, the users of the service (in the case of Live, we even pay for it) are asking for tools that help automate us self policing. This doesn't mean we can't have an appeals system in place, etc. We don't want to squelch someone's right to free expression, but they don't have the right to corner an unwilling audience. I'll link a few fun examples below, there's a million more:

http://fatuglyorslutty.com/2011/12/26/naughty-list/
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/2012/03/23/recommended-activity/
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/2012/02/13/lamoureux/
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/2012/02/10/greeting-ritual/

There's more, they're not limited to XBox Live, there's plenty of WOW chat, CS:S, LoL, etc. on that site. It's extreme and it's way beyond "just deal with it". I'm saying let's band together and work with the industry to address this problem, because most of us are sick of it. I don't want my daughter logging on to see her inbox full of that kind of nastiness, I don't want it for myself, I don't want it for anyone who doesn't want it. Let's get some tools that can give people a choice.

Right now it's basically: 1) mute everyone indiscriminately, 2) listen to everyone, bastards included, 3) deal with the onerous task of manually muting every jerk in every match that's being nasty, then block the nasty messages they start sending, etc.

Those aren't good solutions, we can design way better systems than that and make them user optional.

My problems with government is more philosophical than about my quality of life. I am against redistribution of wealth, whether from transfer payments (corporate welfare, Medicare, etc) or a graduated tax; to me it is nothing more than state-mandated stealing. I also think that most (not all) federal programs can be more efficiently run by the private sector or by state and local governments. Anyway, that is off topic, but I just wanted to give some background for my reasoning.

In the same way, I tend to favor more decentralized solutions to any social problems I run across. If groups of people want to self-regulate their environment by forming groups with like minded individuals, I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. I am just rather wary of an overarching corporate or government authority passing judgment. Me neither, I just dislike the idea of regulating the end user unless it is truly the only fix. I would rather try every other solution first, if possible, before resorting to more regulation. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this at all. In fact, I am all for it. Just as long as the system cannot be easily abused by ne'er-do-wells. That would be my main fear.

Orcish, I agree with you and that video and I'd love to help. Abuse—even when it appears "harmless" to outside observers—is heartbreaking. But this is where I must admit I am not personally involved in social gaming. In fact, the last I heard about Microsoft's online gaming community, a user was banned for being gay or something (having the word gay in his username, if I'm not mistaken.) Where do I even begin? I'm a fish out of water. What do I say to Microsoft or other hosts of gaming communities? Is there a template letter I can approve (and modify if necessary) and forward to their support desk?

Wow, thanks for pointing that out. I was (again) a very good episode. As a PC only player who focuses on SP I never experienced this, but holy crap.

The best statement was at the end:

"We are the culture that took in the people that others refused"

Heck, I've seen this in the comic book store I worked. People who had painted a huge bullseye on their back really flourished in this anime sub culture. That should also be possible with games.

At least then I have less of a conscience when I bully them in real life ;-)

So, in other words you're OK with it as long as it goes from the poor to the rich, because all those measures you mention are there to undo the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The rich got their primarily by taking from the poorer people. Wealth doesn't just materialize and the top 1% are not working that much harder than the bottom 1% are.

That's sort of the problem, people are outraged by efforts to redistribute the money back that had previously been redistributed to the greedy.