Reporting players who intentionally lose a cooperative game

[arisanana]

I've seen similar threads regarding intentional losses on Hanabi, but I'd like to ask about a bit more niche of a situation.

Sometimes players disagree about certain moves and then if things get bad, certain types of players will either:

• try explaining their own logic

• tell the other player what to do

• start insulting the other player

• propose abandon

• bomb the game without question by using the remaining bomb count

Yes, we're told to open a moderation report, and yes, I've reported my fair share of insulters and red thumbed people I disagree with but would rather not further a dispute with, but when it comes to bombing the game, I've only ever been able to report the player when they just happen to be aggressive and insult me in chat at the same time — in such cases, I honestly don't know whether they get moderated for the bombing or the insult alone, and from the reports I can find, the most remarkable one only gave a -1 karma punishment for such a case, which is honestly rather depressing considering that you can get 1 karma back just by finishing a game, but the -10 ELO from someone's intentional bombing can take even more than 10 perfect games to earn back. But a punishment is punishment, and it's up to the moderator discretion (I don't know if this is just the prescribed punishment for such reports).

As it stands, in my blurb above, there's no option for "intentional game throwing". I've consulted the bugs/suggestions pages, this forum, the support page, and even the FAQ for anything I could to inform myself in the past on such matters and the most I found was this small section in the FAQ:

What is absolutely forbidden?
On Board Game Arena, it is absolutely forbidden to:

• Insult other players in any manner.

• Create multiple accounts and play against oneself to boost one's ranking.

• Trolling, admin-bashing, moderator-bashing, empty critiques or defamation. Please share your frustrations with your therapist rather than imposing them on strangers on the internet.

Breaking these rules can lead to the removal of your account and/or a ban from the website.

I would say throwing a game for any reason is "trolling", especially as it doesn't fall under a mutually agreed abandonment. Then, throwing the game is a reportable offense, no? Then acting on that, I'd go to report the player.

Pasts posts similar to this have had suggestions to report as "quit a game in progress" since in a way, it is quitting the game in progress, and I wholeheartedly agree with that perspective! But going to "quit a game in progress" will only give you a statement that these are taken care of by the automatic karma penalty for actually leaving the game via quit game, with no room for describing an unusual case of throwing a game.

The other closest option, "ruined a game by playing randomly ...", likewise just gives a statement sympathizing with your pain and being unable to force a player to play a way, which is true (it's painful being forced to guess at the high level conventions someone clues by in Hanabi when you've never encountered it before, and it's painful being forced to not use finesse because someone joined a finesse room without actually knowing finesse). The only recommended course is to red thumb a player.

The last resort is "insulted someone", but since that is another accusation in itself, reporting something as an "insult" when it's not exactly an insult is basically asking to be modded back, as I see it. Therefore, if someone throws the game without so much as a word in chat, there's no showable proof left in chat to report such actions.

Now, if someone who's been modded recently and (apparently?) doesn't have access to chats until a later date throws the game, there's no way they'd leave aggression proof in the chat since they can't chat. Essentially, there's no way to directly report a game thrown intentionally.
(And yes, I was the one who accepted a game with the player, but it's a whole other discussion about the UI of being able to see the ! mark on the start game screen before hitting start and after missing that not getting another warning until you visit a player's page and see that red "this player has been modded recently" bar)

I tried searching the forum about reporting players but either I'm searching for the wrong things, or all the threads I've found keep going off on a tangent. I don't know if this sort of thing would be better to bring forward as a suggestion, but I'd welcome any insight on the reporting process for such things. Apologies for the super long post!

[pjt33]

The previous section on the code of conduct also says

On Board Game Arena, you should not:

• ...
• Engage in provocation / triumphalism / defeatism... anything which is not fair play.
• ...

Breaking these rules will affect your reputation.

IMO that should also cover the situation you describe. However, the claim that breaking the rules will affect reputation is only true in the very narrow sense of affecting other players' opinions of you. The only recourse offered for anything except running out of time is the red thumb, because the site administrators deliberately abstain from providing real enforcement mechanisms.

[MoiMagnus]

As it stands, in my blurb above, there's no option for "intentional game throwing".

Isn't that simply kingmaking? (Which I'm sure is banned)
Well, it's a weird kind of kingmaking since their playing against their own interest in favour of "no one" instead of someone, but that seems a reasonable generalisation of kingmaking to cooperative games.

[arisanana]

As it stands, in my blurb above, there's no option for "intentional game throwing".

Isn't that simply kingmaking? (Which I'm sure is banned)
Well, it's a weird kind of kingmaking since their playing against their own interest in favour of "no one" instead of someone, but that seems a reasonable generalisation of kingmaking to cooperative games.

Ah, I didn't address that because I generally forget about that option (honestly I've rarely seen anything that makes me think of it), but I have actually tried reporting under the option designated for "kingmaking" (the wording is different, although the statement remains directly mentioning kingmaking) and the statement page is just like the "ruined a game by playing randomly, slowly, etc" option: give a public red thumbs.

I saw in some other post/thread or somewhere that enough public red thumbs vs green thumbs ratio will dock your karma points? And I do see some players (most notably Hanabi-dedicated accounts with a bad track record) who have probably been red thumbed so many times every time i see them or pass by their page, their karma is in the red due to the number of points docked over and over I guess, but given that they play "well" usually according to higher standards and aren't antagonistic 100% of the time, they won't be constantly red thumbed, so this is a rather specific situation where people who have a penchant to antagonize others may get noted but not people who usually stay in line and stick their foot out "occasionally"...

[DrClick]

Hi
That's a nice subject to cover and reading most ideas or suggestions always help us define new boundaries.
The thing is that's a bit tricky on our side to define exactly who is intentionally trolling a game.
And that's why we have the red thumbs and community filters.
Everytime you enter a game (especially outside of Arena mode), you're teamed with people that are matching an average karma score and an ELO average (at best or the closest the system could find), so you have higher probability to meet people that are at the same level of investment in a game then you.

Technically, in a perfect world, using this system, you should always meet people that gives the same respect you do with others.
But.

Defining a player that is "trolling" on purpose is way beyond what moderators can see, or to what machine learning and IA can do (for the moment).

On many occasions in plenty of reports, we've had people talking about other people acting badly in game. And i must admit that, if on most occasions, it was totally right to report them, i felt desperate at writing any valuable answer.

Cause people are people.
Even at the highest ranking in E-sports, cyclism, boxing, schools or spelling-bees contests, there are some people acting strangely. Suddenly. They can cheat, leave, abandon, get sick, etc...
And the higher the rank, the most disapointing to everyone who cares about it, and more especially to thoses involved in a competition. It happens. Sometimes. More often than i was thinking.

Since years working as moderator (or else), i've understood that what makes them not "trolling" on purpose are all up to their own stories: Are they tired? Are they using an account from a friend (or a parent one)? Did they had an emergency they didn't know how to handle? Did they forgot to play and fell asleep? Are they lying? Have they set the right language?

With close to 8M accounts, it simply happens.

And because we're relying on humans to play and to moderate, the system is not perfect and have flaws. Not that many, but when a user is complaining about it, we know that this feeling is already hitting him/her a bit too hard.

There's plenty of options on BGA we're improving everydays.
- The red thumbs is helping a lot to light the road for the next players.
- Reports can come in handy, when there's a clear abuse of the system, or someone you've met often and acting weirdly (you're being read by mods, and we sometimes have talks about user cases. You're not just a "number".)
- You can setup your game filters to only meet players up to your standards (more waiting time, but game quality is usually better).
- A good way too is to play with friends, or people you've met and enjoyed to play with/against. Adding them to your friendlist is a great value.
- Switching game from time to time? Or your time of play. That help prevent playing against the same players again and again.
- Joining a group? Many groups for different countries can help you find valuable games, too!
- Arena mode and/or tournaments will also help pre-filter some players.

There's plenty of ways to "filter" humans, but there's none that can perfectly give you, everytime on every tables, a perfect match you wished for.
But on most occasions, a good game time will happen..

Regards,

[aesche]

(Writing all this the 2nd time already, as the 1st was lost with some weird reload…)

Hi
That's a nice subject to cover and reading most ideas or suggestions always help us define new boundaries.
[…]
Regards,

Thanks for your detailed answer to this, DrClick! It‘s very appreciated how you are eager to do the best to improve the situation about this issue.

I, however, don‘t agree on the usefulness of your solutions. This is based on quite some experience in Hanabi along the discussed issue. It very likely can not be generalised, however, from experience and reading here, when such issues are brought up, it almost always is about Hanabi (and there even mostly about 2p Hanabi) specifically.

- The red thumbs is helping a lot to light the road for the next players.

In Hanabi, there must be a ton of players that abuse the system and kill games on purpose. And there are many further, less serious reasons to give red thumbs, or at least to not give a green thumb. Therefore, one almost never has a public red thumb available, and if there is one again after a while, it‘s gone very fast again for totally fair reasons. As a consequence, there probably are almost no Hanabi bombers that are capped on ELO because of public red thumbs. So a new player has to go through all of them, getting a game bombed by every single of them, before he lighted the road for himself alone - if he‘s still in the mood to play the game by then.

- Reports can come in handy, when there's a clear abuse of the system, or someone you've met often and acting weirdly (you're being read by mods, and we sometimes have talks about user cases. You're not just a "number".)

I‘ve tried that repeatedly. If the culprit is so stupid to abuse the system AND be verbally abusive at the same time, there is a chance that a report for insulting someone is successful, leading to a warning without ELO penalty, or a very small ELO penalty (3-10). Neither of this can be filtered out with settings. But if he only abuses the system (pushes for abandoning the game just for ELO preservation, and bombs the game if the abandon is refused), there is not even a way to get this to the table of a moderator. Also if the opposite keeps being repeated, it‘s simply wrong, even if the report msg in the first case contains a clear statement against the system abuse.

- You can setup your game filters to only meet players up to your standards (more waiting time, but game quality is usually better).

See the points above, to avoid Hanabi bombers, these filters have no actual usefulness.

And I‘ll just not address your following two and the last point, they don‘t live up to you taking the issue of this thread seriously.

Defining a player that is "trolling" on purpose is way beyond what moderators can see

For Hanabi, I strongly disagree with that. It‘s either consecutive bombs of one player till game over, or consecutive purposefully discarding/ignoring of playables, usually following right after a declined abandon request, till the game ends or gets bombed too. Any decent Hanabi player will recognise that easily, and the 1% of exceptional situations that you all list easily should be filterable by looking at the chat log.

Now, for a super popular PREMIUM game as Hanabi, it certainly should not be expected too much that there are some specifically Hanabi trained mods, applying Hanabi specific moderations.

Accordingly, I think there are some measures that actually could be taken to improve the situation:
- Actually make abuse of the system reportable, so that it lands on the table of a mod.
- Increase the penalties for abusing the system, so that it actually has an impact on ELO and maybe players behaviour, or at least can be filtered out by others.
If you are willing to go this way, and need specifically Hanabi trained mods, let me know.

And, most importantly:
Stop the ELO abuse! Give automatic ELO penalties for abandoning cooperative games! And if you want to consider some of the mentioned edge cases, allow 1 free abandon for every 10th completed game. That this still is not addressed is one of the technical issues with Hanabi that I have a really hard time to understand why noone cares about, over years, in such a popular premium game.

Thanks for your consideration, I hope these explanations help to understand the issue here and what could be done about it.

[arisanana]

Hi
That's a nice subject to cover and reading most ideas or suggestions always help us define new boundaries.
The thing is that's a bit tricky on our side to define exactly who is intentionally trolling a game.
And that's why we have the red thumbs and community filters.
...
Regards,

Thanks for the speedy and in depth response from the perspective of a moderator! I also have experience (very elsewhere) sitting in a position where I've seen and heard various complaints and understand that you can never know what's actually going on behind a screen so I can get what you mean (I believe). Still, I'd like to raise a few points following up yours:

Defining a player that is "trolling" on purpose is way beyond what moderators can see, or to what machine learning and IA can do (for the moment).
...
- Reports can come in handy, when there's a clear abuse of the system, or someone you've met often and acting weirdly (you're being read by mods, and we sometimes have talks about user cases. You're not just a "number".)

Definitely agree that "trolling" isn't exactly a clear cut case issue! There's definitely a need to hear different perspectives on such a case one person considers "trolling" or evaluate the circumstances to be able to even begin to judge that. However, certain things literally, technically, whichever is the correct English, can't be reported (a number of the report options redirects to red thumbs, without an actual submission form). I understand that there may be many repeat types of cases (such as the constant reports of someone playing too slow, perhaps) that moderators can't actually do anything about and don't quite break any rules, but certain other things that are "heavier" matters would be nice to have a team review, especially when it goes beyond a "minor" inconvenience (I would assume playing slowly as an example is mainly an inconvenience since hey some people need time to think, I get it). My frustration here is that I'd like a way to get these "heavier" reports to the moderators for consideration, since yes, machine learning is not at the point of making ethical judgements and AI can't read such situations, but human moderators who can review these can at least discuss whether it appears to be "trolling" (or other infractions) or a misunderstanding! Being unable to report something means being unable to take that first step to reach out for an issue we believe to be an abuse of the system.

(Also, just because I'm genuinely befuddled on what to do in my case in the OG post and it ties back here: there's no way to report someone who is suspended from chat yet makes intentional losing plays in that period of time because they can't use chat and no report option currently exists for reporting such moves; the workaround can't apply without chats to report!)

- You can setup your game filters to only meet players up to your standards (more waiting time, but game quality is usually better).

True, the game filters do catch the players constantly in the red (I've learned!) but there are even more players who learn to act good after one severe hit to their points (within the non-red state) and finish n number of games to fix their karma points and come back pristine as possible so they don't get hit by karma filters. Of course, I don't believe every last person who messes up occasionally shouldn't have a chance to fix their mistakes, but constant offenders (I do mean constant, not simply repeat) aren't accidentally doing it, it's an intentional action they take when they want to take it. In such cases, people who know how to play the karma system can slip through the filter so we still run into them.

- Joining a group? Many groups for different countries can help you find valuable games, too!

I will say I haven't joined big groups for certain games since I don't have the best impression of groups so I can't speak too much on this. However, the issue is that there is a limited number of people in a small group, and at the end of the day, everyone's times may not line up, or the player count means playing different games and coming back to what you wanted to play another time, etc other reasons. Besides, I think the beauty of BGA is automatching and coincidentally meeting people who you can hit it off with—that's how I've made all the lasting friends I have here!

- A good way too is to play with friends, or people you've met and enjoyed to play with/against. Adding them to your friendlist is a great value.

Following the above, it's because playing in public/random rooms gives you that chance to make more friends that being able to safely (and pleasantly) play with new folks is important—of course, playing with friends is an option, but they may not always be around and playing too much with the same person can make a game dull—if you've played 1000 games together, you probably have a grasp of what they'll do and vice versa. The excitement factor is gone.
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Definitely, a surefire way to have the so-called "perfect" match isn't feasible. Yes, we can learn to adapt and let it go and just agree to abandon so we don't run into "bombers" or other intentional loss-makers. Indeed, most of the time a civil (if chat-less) game happens where you can share joys over fine plays and sadness over the inevitable together. Even so, a loss is heavier than a win, and one game gone wrong overshadows the other games you've made it through, and when such losses at the hand of one player accumulate, it may overshadow the entire experience... (speaking on behalf of those who've given up on playing games with anyone other than their immediate friend list, or have given up on cooperative games altogether)

[arisanana]

Thanks aesche for the input and suggestions! I'd just like to add a few comments to a few places too, not only for you but for anyone else reading this:

This is based on quite some experience in Hanabi along the discussed issue. It very likely can not be generalised, however, from experience and reading here, when such issues are brought up, it almost always is about Hanabi (and there even mostly about 2p Hanabi) specifically.

Just to pipe in here, I've seen elsewhere (suggestion wall/bug reports) cases where "bombers" appear in more-than-2p Hanabi as well, so just to broaden the spectrum, I believe it is a problem within all sorts of Hanabi settings! Not to generalize the entire Hanabi experience, of course—I've met amazing people through Hanabi, too. As for other games, I don't really know myself since I haven't come across that many cooperative games and... well Bandido doesn't seem to be toxic haha you don't lose much for losing afaik.

- The red thumbs is helping a lot to light the road for the next players.

In Hanabi, there must be a ton of players that abuse the system and kill games on purpose. And there are many further, less serious reasons to give red thumbs, or at least to not give a green thumb. Therefore, one almost never has a public red thumb available, and if there is one again after a while, it‘s gone very fast again for totally fair reasons. As a consequence, there probably are almost no Hanabi bombers that are capped on ELO because of public red thumbs. So a new player has to go through all of them, getting a game bombed by every single of them, before he lighted the road for himself alone - if he‘s still in the mood to play the game by then.

To be fair, I don't think this is strictly the new players, since from what I've noticed (in my own games and observations) people who bomb intentionally are usually higher to mid-ranked players, with most higher ranked players refusing to play with beginners. Instead, this issue is really faced by anyone who starts a Hanabi game—you never know if your teammate may be the kind of person to bomb after you mess up once and someone (may or may not be yourself) refuses an abandon.

Beyond that, I do agree that public red thumbs are hard to gain—the system is supposed to prevent abuse of red thumbs (which is fair, I think there's probably a decent chunk of players, Hanabi or not, who'd public red thumb anyone they think is "stupid" over missing one clue or messing up a couple times on a bad day even if in the past they've played together fine without exchange of words)—and if you don't have a public red thumb available after the game in question, most people aren't going to remember the username to come back to after they find 5 people they're willing to green thumb.

Defining a player that is "trolling" on purpose is way beyond what moderators can see

For Hanabi, I strongly disagree with that. It‘s either consecutive bombs of one player till game over, or consecutive purposefully discarding/ignoring of playables, usually following right after a declined abandon request, till the game ends or gets bombed too. Any decent Hanabi player will recognise that easily, and the 1% of exceptional situations that you all list easily should be filterable by looking at the chat log.

I know I just said in my last reply to Dr.Click that trolling isn't clear cut—it's not!—but I must agree that with Hanabi it's not that hard to see if there's malicious intent or not if you check the circumstances leading up to the bomb. Sometimes it's missed hints, sometimes it's an unfortunate accident, but the malicious cases are when it (continuous bombing) happens almost right after someone "misses a hint" (doesn't play the card the other person wanted them to play, doesn't discard the right card, etc) the second time, or "makes bad plays" multiple times (gave a questionable hint, used a bomb to play in a dire situation and the other person doesn't approve of bomb to plays, uses a positional discard to play and the other person expects bomb to plays, etcetc), or right after something said in chat acts as a trigger, and the bombing begins after a resulting abandon request following any of the above.

In the past, I've met someone who thought I made a bad play in a rather dire and nothing-to-do-about-it situations and after I refused to abandon because it wasn't beyond hope to reach 30/30, began playing randomly, re: cards that had NO hints or would obviously NOT be something to play now (ie, chop, newest, 5 when there are no playable 5s, etc), and then antagonize me saying I bombed the game when all the bombs came from them (this was the notable -1 karma point case :')).

Accordingly, I think there are some measures that actually could be taken to improve the situation:
...
- Increase the penalties for abusing the system, so that it actually has an impact on ELO and maybe players behaviour, or at least can be filtered out by others.

Maybe impact on ELO isn't the best way to go—I agree there should be some form of penalty for system abuse but A) lower ELO only means they'll be playing with newer players who don't know any better and newer players are going to suffer their wrath B) it doesn't change the fact that they'll still be able to play and do the same again and C) it kinda hurts to say this but some "bombers" do play well—with like-minded players. Meaning, they only play well with people who have the same conventions, same thinking style, same play style, as them, and only then will they not bomb or hurl insults. If any of these are slightly off, then we have a problem on hand.

So, another filter would be appreciated, I feel. For such, maybe it could be argued that they should filter by "finesse" or some other convention, but being honest, not everyone, especially players who think they're confident enough to pull a game towards a win no matter what, is going to take the time to change their preferences to finesse—those who sit manually will also sit at a standard convention table either way. I've seen somewhere (again suggestion/bug walls) mention of an "abandon" filter, which would be nice if a viable implementation were given. Say, Abandon OK vs No Abandon rooms, with abandon options removed from the UI in No Abandon settings? Even if this weren't a troublesome implementation, it doesn't resolve people bombing intentionally without so much as proposing abandon..

I'm curious about moderator stance on such suggestions? Better to not make them? Better to go to the suggestion page if we want to make them and not bring them to forum? Or is there some existing reason behind no such possibilities?...
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I just want to facilitate a discussion on reporting options as I haven't seen anything that gets to the root of this or addresses these specifically—see others' ideas and thoughts about the situation! As I may be swept up in my own views, hearing thoughts like aesche's gives me another perspective and ideas to think through, which even if we'd need to go through suggestions (someone enlighten me) to possibly get some change implemented, does give some peace of mind otherwise

[Sparky0]

How often do you think this would be reported? Is it a problem of sufficient moderators?

I've had this happen several times, and just giving a personal red thumb seems weak. In my last game a player bombed in 3 consecutive rounds. After 2 rounds of bombs from them, everyone else agreed to abandon, but rather than accepting, in chat they essentially said, "you want a bomb? ok, you want it" and proceeded to bomb a third time.

"Inting" is not unique to Hanabi - games like League of Legends have strong punishment for it. Maybe BGA can borrow some of their ideas for how to deal with it.

[RicardoRix]

Removing ELO from Hanabi should alleviate these type of problems. Simple change, everyone benefits.
Make it ELO == number of games played, if you want to find experienced players.