I think the integration with Steam should be made optional if it's kept at all.
There are numerous reasons why this can cause problems for people.

I'll go through a few off the top of my head right now, but please feel free to add if you think I missed anything. Individual problems will only be known to those having them, etc.

• Steam family sharing. If you leave the client open, just to talk, or you wanted to watch a replay, or play a game - you block anyone from using family sharing until you stop. That's an annoying negative.

• Steam downloads. This one definitely affects me, and i'm sure it does many others as well. I have "download while play" on steam OFF, because I simply don't have good enough internet to have that on and also play games online - I don't want to deal with annoying lag, especially because for various reasons I am generally the host of such games. This basically ensures I have to leave the client off to make sure things download. Not a great user experience.

• The steam overlay has caused issues for several players i've spoken to and have mentioned it on the forums.

• Preventing people from launching the steam version of the game if they have the client open.

• Politeness sometimes makes people not ask people "ingame" to do anything. I can see a lot of that happening.

• People who are younger and are policed by family about steam game time. Might not happen to you, but let's think about others. I'm just imagining some poor kid with 100 hours of steam time having not actually played much at all.

Beyond all of this, steam's "ingame" feature simply doesn't make sense for people in the client to have. I'm not playing a game. If someone is using the play time to help them monitor something, the amount of time they've got the client open isn't important and is actively unhelpful.

A counter in the client itself for actual ingame time would be more useful.

I would also like it if this was an optional feature.

In the meantime you can revert back to the previous client version here https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/releases/tag/v2022.5.0

Proper feedback should go here. https://forum.faforever.com/topic/4244/client-2022-6-0-features

To cut off what is absolutely sure to cause a little argument right now.. you kinda did mention Ftx, @Psions.

And to reiterate my colleague from a different thread, please keep the discussion to balance and hows and whys, not assertions or irrelevant ad hominem etc.

@BlackYps said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

@IndexLibrorum said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

You describe the exact approach we currently use to cover non-participant reports. Because we cannot cover each hypothetical, we've consistently phrased it as "we do not generally accept reports from people not participating in the game". Even with this type of phrasing we already frequently get attempts at rule-lawyering (for this and similar rules), where people argue that "well, it's not exactly against the rules as written, so you can't ban me", which is why we have to resort to these more general phrasings. But the situation you describe is the exact protocol we now adhere to.

I feel that it would make sense to spell out the reasoning of rules more explicitly in the rule page. Currently we have the rules that explain what is allowed or forbidden and we have moderators stepping around specific questions by saying "we don't generally do X", but if we leave the discourse at that it keeps being frustrating for both sides. As a player you don't get a clearcut answer, only vague statements that don't help you to gauge when you risk a ban. As a moderator you don't want to be too broad with your statements because some smartass will abuse the statement and find behaviour that should be punished but that would be against the wording of the moderator.

To be fair here, the players do absolutely know what risks a ban: breaking the rules on that page. Not being reported for it, (and that we do not proactively seek out, nor (generally) ban people based on the reports of those not in the game) does not change this. Technically, they are only "getting away" with it by virtue of not being reported by players in the game.

So it really wouldn't change anything to spell it out more, and as has been said previously by you and Index, spelling it out too broadly is unhelpful because we can't cover all edge cases, and it only invites a situation where a specific edge case hasn't been written down.

@BlackYps said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

If we instead spell out the reasonings and goals in the rule page, then it becomes clearer for everyone. We could add statements like "A report from a person not in the game will only be considered if it explains how the behaviour in the game is harmful for the community at large. Otherwise it will be discarded." This would also make it clearer what reasoning the mod team uses to interpret the rules.

I would think something similar to this, - i.e a statement to give a few examples, but specifically not be an exhaustive list around why we would sometimes do this, is reasonable to add, but i'm not entirely sure it will change much.

There are a few other concerns we have regarding ctrl-k vs recall which are:

-Players may feel pressured to agree that there was a consensus to quit, even when they didn't want to, because of the possibility of moderation.

This situation is hopefully very rare, but it's one we don't want to happen.

-Players may report for ctrl-k for whatever reason later, even if they originally agreed (or did not care at the time)

We are especially concerned about the second scenario because we don't want a situation where a banned player states that at the time it was agreed... but we've received a report for base ctrl-k.

The ambiguity causes us problems that I think we would all rather avoid.

@BlackYps said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

@IndexLibrorum said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

You describe the exact approach we currently use to cover non-participant reports. Because we cannot cover each hypothetical, we've consistently phrased it as "we do not generally accept reports from people not participating in the game". Even with this type of phrasing we already frequently get attempts at rule-lawyering (for this and similar rules), where people argue that "well, it's not exactly against the rules as written, so you can't ban me", which is why we have to resort to these more general phrasings. But the situation you describe is the exact protocol we now adhere to.

I feel that it would make sense to spell out the reasoning of rules more explicitly in the rule page. Currently we have the rules that explain what is allowed or forbidden and we have moderators stepping around specific questions by saying "we don't generally do X", but if we leave the discourse at that it keeps being frustrating for both sides. As a player you don't get a clearcut answer, only vague statements that don't help you to gauge when you risk a ban. As a moderator you don't want to be too broad with your statements because some smartass will abuse the statement and find behaviour that should be punished but that would be against the wording of the moderator.

To be fair here, the players do absolutely know what risks a ban: breaking the rules on that page. Not being reported for it, (and that we do not proactively seek out, nor (generally) ban people based on the reports of those not in the game) does not change this. Technically, they are only "getting away" with it by virtue of not being reported by players in the game.

So it really wouldn't change anything to spell it out more, and as has been said previously by you and Index, spelling it out too broadly is unhelpful because we can't cover all edge cases, and it only invites a situation where a specific edge case hasn't been written down.

@BlackYps said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

If we instead spell out the reasonings and goals in the rule page, then it becomes clearer for everyone. We could add statements like "A report from a person not in the game will only be considered if it explains how the behaviour in the game is harmful for the community at large. Otherwise it will be discarded." This would also make it clearer what reasoning the mod team uses to interpret the rules.

I would think something similar to this, - i.e a statement to give a few examples, but specifically not be an exhaustive list around why we would sometimes do this, is reasonable to add, but i'm not entirely sure it will change much.

@Tersto said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:

I'm sure he could search through enough replays to eventually find a reportable offence for almost everyone that happened a long time ago. This can be abused to get people banned before or in tournaments so you don't have to play against them or also just if you don't like them.

To be clear, in general, this should not happen. We do not, in most cases, issue bans on people who were reported by users who were not in the game. There are some exceptions to this, but the example of player x trawling through replays of player y to find a violation shouldn't be an issue.
A few examples where this doesn't apply are cheating/exploiting, rating manipulation, cheat maps, etc.

The idea of a statute of limitations is interesting, though, because I too think it would be strange if a player reported another for, say, a 6 month old violation.

However, we can't say it's entirely nefarious - it might simply be because a player did not know how to make a report, or did not know reports exist (this is fairly common).
A game from some time ago might also be part of a pattern of behaviour and we'd want to consider it then.

As a result, i'm not sure we can make a hard and fast rule to say if something was x months old it can't be checked, because there will always be edge cases where we should be.
And then, what's the point of having it stated for a certain amount of time if we can't always guarantee that's the case? Better to have people be aware that we will take it into account that a report is old.

I will say that it is rare that a report is made for something that didn't happen in the same day, let alone more than a week past, when a specific game is being reported.

However, you can be assured that we would notice reports being made against much less recent games and consider that, as above.

As a whole. I've detailed some reasons why in the proper feedback thread.

I think the integration with Steam should be made optional if it's kept at all.
There are numerous reasons why this can cause problems for people.

I'll go through a few off the top of my head right now, but please feel free to add if you think I missed anything. Individual problems will only be known to those having them, etc.

• Steam family sharing. If you leave the client open, just to talk, or you wanted to watch a replay, or play a game - you block anyone from using family sharing until you stop. That's an annoying negative.

• Steam downloads. This one definitely affects me, and i'm sure it does many others as well. I have "download while play" on steam OFF, because I simply don't have good enough internet to have that on and also play games online - I don't want to deal with annoying lag, especially because for various reasons I am generally the host of such games. This basically ensures I have to leave the client off to make sure things download. Not a great user experience.

• The steam overlay has caused issues for several players i've spoken to and have mentioned it on the forums.

• Preventing people from launching the steam version of the game if they have the client open.

• Politeness sometimes makes people not ask people "ingame" to do anything. I can see a lot of that happening.

• People who are younger and are policed by family about steam game time. Might not happen to you, but let's think about others. I'm just imagining some poor kid with 100 hours of steam time having not actually played much at all.

Beyond all of this, steam's "ingame" feature simply doesn't make sense for people in the client to have. I'm not playing a game. If someone is using the play time to help them monitor something, the amount of time they've got the client open isn't important and is actively unhelpful.

A counter in the client itself for actual ingame time would be more useful.

I would also like it if this was an optional feature.

In the meantime you can revert back to the previous client version here https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/releases/tag/v2022.5.0

Proper feedback should go here. https://forum.faforever.com/topic/4244/client-2022-6-0-features

Agree with everything above about not using this. We do not need 3 variations of colours, since the max players we can have is 16 anyway.

Having 3 variations of a colour will make it very difficult for people to communicate about them even for people who aren't colourblind.

warning: SND: XACT3DApply failed.

looks like surround sound, turn it off, go to stereo

To cut off what is absolutely sure to cause a little argument right now.. you kinda did mention Ftx, @Psions.

And to reiterate my colleague from a different thread, please keep the discussion to balance and hows and whys, not assertions or irrelevant ad hominem etc.