In many games known for their toxicity, using League of Legends and DoTA as my core examples, from a rational point of view toxicity is an entirely negative thing to engage in. You increase the odds of your getting banned or chat restricted from the game, you distract yourself from the game that you're playing, you distract others from the game that you're playing, and you generally decrease your teams odds of winning. I don't believe that any of these claims deserve much in the way of justification; the League of Legends client likes to regale players with information on how much lower your odds of winning are when the game gets toxic. As a result, there is effectively no motivation to engage in it, but yet it still happens. The reason is that the toxicity is intrinsically motivated, for the toxic player unleashing the torrent of insults is inherently rewarding and its effects on the game at large are something that they tolerate to receive that reward. The tight timeline of a game also gives players no time to 'wind it down' so to speak, and try to reach a cool state. As a result, despite the fact that the designers effectively use both reinforcers and punishers to discourage toxicity and encourage positive behaviour, toxicity continues in League of Legends. That is not likely to change in the near future.
But that's a different game entirely! This is Forum Mafia! It actually, at least in theory, has several advantages to discourage toxicity as relative to League of Legends. The first is the lack of anonymity; any actions you undertake in one game can be traced back to you specifically and may come back to bite you, discouraging toxic behaviour. This is one contributor to the pattern that I noticed back when I played league that once you reach a high enough ELO to be consistently playing with the same people, no one really acts toxic in the same way because it has consequences! People remember. Another is that you have at least in theory an entire day phase to respond to things that upset you; you can simply step away and forget about it for a while, and then come back whenever you aren't in an enraged mood. Another (really piling them on) is that the game isn't competitive in the same way that League of Legends is; no one is really tracking winrates except those few weirdos who take this way too seriously. A final reason is just the general atmosphere of the site; people behave in the same way that people around them behave and mafia is just generally less toxic to be in than league which discourages people further from being toxic in a virtuous cycle most of the time! And yet, we still see toxicity. Hmm.
On the other side, there is an extremely big reason to be toxic in mafia that doesn't exist in League of Legends. Simply put, toxicity
works
. I am willing to do the legwork citing this claim if it is necessary, but I believe to nearly everyone on this site it goes without saying without me fishing for examples and potentially offending people. There are many many examples of both town and scum either securing the lynch they want or avoiding being lynched when they don't want via toxic behaviour. An interesting addendum to it is that people are generally a lot more accepting of this behaviour from town. For my own part, and I cannot back this up outside of my own personal experience, I consider the optimal strategy in mafia to be something along the lines of being as toxic as you need to be
. In general I do not think it is reasonable possible to convince someone to lynch or ignore a person being toxic and fighting hard without using the same kinds of behaviour yourself. What you end up with is a system where toxic behaviour is being either continuously or intermittently (depending on how often you think this works) positively reinforced with the desired lynches when sought, and negatively reinforced via the removal of scumreads. Another way of saying this is that every time a player successfully gets their way via a toxic fit, they are conditioned to use that kind of behaviour in the future. Other players also learn from this, and are also more likely to use that kind of behaviour in the future. It's a vicious cycle of escalating toxicity.The answer to this, of course, is to have rules. And ban players who don't follow the rules. That way, you have clear guidelines in terms of what behaviour is and isn't acceptable and you have a consistent system to punish people with, and quickly (because punishment immediately following behaviour is most effective) correct? Well...
This is the entire ruleset around toxicity. Besides slurs, there is no clear demarcation of what is and isn't acceptable besides citing other bans. What does excessively abusive behaviour mean? I'm going to take an example of a ban I am not super keen on, and I won't even dig for my ban for saying Rb 'wasnt as smart as he thinks he is' because hey, it wasnt on a recent page.Since Mafia is based largely on conflict and psychological manipulation, we are somewhat more tolerant of aggressive and heated posts in-game than in the rest of the forums. However, game mods will often take action for excessively abusive behavior or slurs, up to and including a force-replacement or modkill. In certain cases, posters with multiple or severe offenses may receive site-wide punishments from the list moderators, such as temporary or permanent bans from joining or playing games. Please refer to the most recent pages of the Ban/Restrictions Announcements thread for an idea of what behavior crosses the line.
Spoiler: Firebringer was banned for a week citing the following 2 posts
Okay, sure. So this is the established baseline for what toxic behaviour is? Okay, so everyone is going to be judged according to these standards? Well, let's look at something that didn't get banned.
Spoiler: Not banned
This does seem, objectively, to be far far worse than anything Firebringer said. I'm going to leave any comments on why the moderators favor certain players over other out of this post because they're simply not going to be productive. I will simply state that it's pretty obvious that punishment isn't evenly handled. Another example of a similar situation which I won't bother to cite is where Flavor Leaf this year literally stated he had tactically replaced from a newbie and faced no punishment for it. In the past, I was banned simply because the mods speculated I tactically replaced out because they didn't like my replace out. I hadn't. I also got banned for outside influences because I 'talked about a conversation' that had happened outside of the game that was not about said ongoing game. The person that I discussed the game with didn't even get banned for it, so clearly there wasn't a misapprehension that we talked about the ongoing game. Nowhere again in the site's history or before has the outside influences clause been used to ban someone for that.
In general, from a user perspective the moderation is a black box where the punishments are so uneven that there's no clear line that you can draw in the sand and say 'this ought to be actionable!' if saying that someone should be tortured and die isn't, given that basically every toxicity ban in site history is less severe than that. In addition regarding the use of punishment to manage aggression in humans, studies have shown that when punishment is inconsistently meted out it does little to mitigate aggression in younger boys1, with tons of other studies find the same thing, in case the claim that 'inconsistent punishment diminishes its effect' needs justification. Many users like to point out it's the same people consistently getting banned up until they either quit or get permabanned or whatever end result is felt; without accusing the mods of bias, it's a reasonably clear statement that the bans are not doing a great job of managing behaviour. Another issue is the fact that the bans are so delayed from the action being punished; if you spray a cat with a spray bottle right when they scratch you, it effectively discourages that behaviour. If you do it much later, it doesn't work. The same is true with humans; time latency in the punishment is critical for effectively discouraging behaviour. And there is going to be a lot of time latency when the entire toxicity rule is one line and incredibly subjective. And when the ruleset is entirely vague and subject to whatever the mods feel is out of bounds at a certain point, even if they are acting in good faith the punishments are guaranteed to be inconsistent due to factors as simple as whether they've had lunch yet that day.
yes, that's a thing.
In order to fix all three of potential mod bias, inconsistency of punishments, and time latency in moderation, I propose the following:
Vagueness is done. All rules are made very explicit. The community as a whole decides exactly where the line is (erring on the less toxic side) and every rule broken has a specific, scaling system of punishments depending on how often they've been broken. The current system of mods having to decide based on vague instructions whether an action is over the line is done; every report needs to clearly violate a rule and if a rule is clearly violated there is a single, exact punishment that is given in response. Punishments are made consistent, and with less need for mods to consider things a violated rule can be acted on much more quickly and immediately cracked down on. This should in theory dramatically increase the effectiveness of bans at deterring favor, it makes the ruleset and mod actions consistent and fair for all users, and it allows mods to step in much more quickly in instances of rulebreaking in an ongoing game. What's the disadvantage?
Spoiler: I cited something that I thought was outside the realm of common sense