Hi, I’m curious what you (Funcom) are doing to tackling racism on official servers?
Right now on the server i’m on (1208) there are at least two full groups of people whose clannames are “kukluxklan” and “Negrohunters”.
On a privately run server it would fall on the admin to tackle such issues, but on the official it would fall on you, but i’ve read elsewere that you said you simply don’t do anything regarding policing such (in my view) grave topics, thus allowing blatant racism to flourish.
I would suggest at least some form of admin policing, either by volunteers, like i know you have used before (i was one very shortly in one of your games), as not doing anything is pretty low standard, and reflects extremely poorly back on funcom (Which would be sad, since i love your games).
Just remind that KKK group that they’re calling themselves a “Circle of Brothers” and that circles of brothers were doing very different things with each other in ancient Greece. Very loving things.
You could pitch it as a story idea to gaming news outlets… “the KKK is alive and well in the land of Conan Exiles”. Maybe some bad press would encourage the devs to find time to implement the same naming censors that every other game seems to have no problem with.
I have not confronted them ingame about the issue, as that would as you say, probably just give them some weird kind of joy, and also, i think this is an “Out of Character” thing, that ought to be solved by admins and not players.
I agree that it also indicates that they are not the sharpest knives in the kitchen, and what little interactions i have seen from them, supports that. That doesnt mean they should “get away” with being racists.
I would actually be totally okay with “In character” racism, if it was someone roleplaying a Dafari capturing solely Shemites and selling them at the slaver market etc etc… But “Out of Game” (real life racism if you will), has no place in games, and should be opposed everywhere.
Whatever gaming violence is involved is totally not the issue. Also please note that the server i play on is PVP, and i almost never play anything but PVP, and love it. Real life racism just shouldnt be a part of that in anyway, regardless of the fact that we chop eachothers heads off all the time
This is actually what i’m affraid will happen, but not by me! As i said, i love Funcom games, and they are mostly very inclusive, and well admin’ed. But in the case of Conan Exiles they seem to have completely dropped the ball.
I fear the backlash from a story like that, would have negative effects on a game company that i really like!
It probably would have a negative impact, which is why it would cause a behavioral change where requests from the player base do not. Practically every other game with online content has some sort of system in place to prevent harassing naming practices… if you try to name your character or guild something racist or otherwise discriminating in most games you will get a warning that it isn’t allowed. They censor certain words in the forums here so I know they’re familiar with the technology. If Funcom has decided not to prevent such naming practices, and then further decides not to remove them when players complain, then perhaps it will take bad publicity and a larger public complaint for them to realize that providing a safe environment for racism to flourish in isn’t really the wisest business practice these days (not to mention the moral aspects).
I did actually forward a number of the racism complaints and customer service responses to some of the industry news outlets. I love the game as well but I’m not going to sit and do nothing about racism.
Not necessarily. Some companies do it poorly. and end up censoring parts of innocent words consisting of offensive words. In this case it actually calls too racial slurs. And then there are various ways to get around the Censorship. ( Censors read base Unicode Scripts of non-English letters that look like English counterparts). If done poorly it can actually call to racism rather than fix it. ( An app game called Summoners war is a good example of this)
Racism will exist whether or not its in the game… Assuming you can censor every L33t, Slur, acronym, and slang term that exists in every culture. (Racism is a global Affair after all… I’ve seen more hate between European and middle eastern countries than rednecks and African Americans… and African Americans with views as skewed and narrow minded towards Caucasians)… Addressing all of those as well is even trickier and more at risk of causing the above problem of calling attention to it.
Besides its American to tolerate and express the rights of free speech and opinion… even if it is intolerance…
They are minority who probably have a couple of black ancestors in the wood pile. (so to speak)… and I doubt the majority are “pure”.
As I myself, am as white as a ghost and I’m mostly Jewish and native American with a bit of north African. so meh.
I’ll take action when they’re burning a Cross in my yard or harassing a friend in real life… let them have their corner of Hyboria and leave them to their sad lives of Hate and Self hate.
PS: I’m generally against any censorship. especially for multi-cultural and global MMO’s. as it leads to various translational problems and barriers. KKK in other countries is a simple way of saying hahahah or lol for us Americans.
They would simply shutdown the official servers and wash their hands of it entirely. Forcing you all to private servers or singleplayer.
Remember, they are offering the official servers as a courtesy. They gain no monetary benefit from them. They could have easily released the game without them. They have 387 PC servers. How could they even moderate that? The server I play on has 4 mods, They do a great job on keeping out this behavior, but there’s still gaps.
If they hired 3 people per server (one for every 8 hour period), and paid them minimum wage for the US. It would cost them nearly half a million a month. They’d have to sell an extra 12,000 copies a month to break even on that. There’s no way that many people are going to be like “oh they have moderated official servers, lets jump right on in!”
Think about that before you make idle threats. But I will wager you won’t even bother. Talking to a news outlet means talking to someone without a computer between you.That’s a little more than most angry players can handle IRL. I bet you won’t ‘pitch’ this. There’s no gall here.
I’m not angry… I just don’t want to let obvious racism slide without doing anything. Free speech doesn’t apply to private environments. Funcom can choose to allow people to name their clans anything they like or they can choose to allow only certain names.
I did already pitch it… I didn’t pitch a specific title; that was just an example. I emailed some industry news outlets reporters with links to the multiple posts where players have complained about racism and Funcom has replied with a version of “not our job”. They can research it and write about it or not. I’m not pursuing it past that at this point… it wasn’t even my original post.
If people use words to make another race feel hated or hunted and nobody even says anything against it then consent to act that way is implied. Some people will then take it further and think nobody will care if they actually physically harm such people outside of the game. If none of the reporters think there’s anything to that, then none of them will write about it. It’s not some big threat… it’s just calling attention (or not) to a potential problem in a way that a company is more apt to respond to.
I’ve already explained how much it would cost. You’re telling Funcom to go bankrupt or be labeled as a racist enabler. What kind of choice is that?
People like you tote this message about hate speech and all that, but you put no thought into the cost involved or the effort to combat it.
I’ve worked closely with admins on a private server I play on. The amount of work required to report someone for hatespeech is daunting when the admins themselves don’t see it as it occurs.
This is what is needed:
Evidence in the form of a screenshot.
A means of showing the evidence, usually uploading it to imgur or some other site.
Then the admin has to verify who is who.
If action is deemed to be taken, they have to wait for the offender to login as there is no means of banning offline players.
That’s all facilitated by the private server’s system. Usually discord is used for communication. Now lets say its an official server. They can’t use discord, too many users would clog it up.
So now they have to set up an out of game reporting system. And using that is tricky. You have to identify which server is which. Which person is which.
And how do you do that? How do you properly verify who is who? Lets say you play on server 1103 and I login to server 1105 and use your name, have a friend screenshot something nasty I said. And they claim its from 1103. Well evidence of MissGrim said something nasty about some race or religion. They get banned wrongfully.
See how messy this gets?
Its not as simple as a MMORPG where there is built in systems. CE was never designed for that. Hell the official servers aren’t even going to be permament. As the game dies down, many of them will be closed. Funcom doesn’t run those inhouse.
They use GPortal. They PAY Gportal to run these servers. They use the same method as the players do that run private servers. The only difference is Official servers run default settings, have no admins, and well no rules to govern them.
This is why Funcom says, “not our problem”. They can not afford to build or staff a fix that you would find acceptable. The laws of physics and economics prevents it.
Unfortunately inbreeding from first cousin marriages results in over 70% of children born with lower than 70 iq’s.
Better to just leave John boy and bobby joe and their incestuous clan alone . Obviously trolls purposely trying to enrage other players.
Just summon a god and crush em or make a black panther clan and go enthrall their clan deliverance style … you got a pretty mouth… and all that.
My clan Invading Uranus isn’t exactly PC but far from racist we hate everyone equally .
Seriously though the more attention you give them the happier they are … do not feed the trolls
I’ve lived long enough to know that stereotypes of various people groups exist for a reason, but I know better than to apply those stereotypes to individuals until they prove themselves one way or the other. I’ve learned to be thick skinned, and that an internet rant isn’t going to change anything.
I wasn’t really complaining about anything. try reading first, and then clarify on “everything” . Besides, a few Derogatory remarks towards white Supremacist, my comments were against censorship. there was no actual complaints… I’m too thick skinned to be bothered by Moronic Trollers on gaming servers.
Whenever I ask people why they play on official servers after hearing about all the lame stuff they put up with, they always say it’s because of “admin abuse”. Well, if they had volunteer admins, I’m sure cries of “admin abuse” would happen on a regular basis and create a whole other mess of drama to deal with.
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