Newspaper and the anonymous function

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    • Newspaper and the anonymous function

      The recent update of 2020-11-18 has removed the fuction of creating an anonymous message within the newspaper and anonymously message people. The reasoning for removing the function was to reduce problematic content being shared and to improve the overall game experience for players by not exposing them to people that do bad with the anonymous function. For example placing harmfull messages or pictures.

      While I do agree with the reasoning why Bytro has removed the function, and think that people must be stopped abusing the anonymous fuction to place that kind of stuff, I also think that alot of good has been removed by doing so.

      In my last 3 games that I have played, the newspaper was amazing. Myself and a bunch of other people used it to write articles about their own countries in roleplay style, which is always amazing to read. But people also started to make actual newspaper articles within the newspaper, for example: "Welcome to North America News, where we cover everything happening within the continent of North America!". This happened a lot and I have taken it over as well since, writing huge articles about the whole ingame world under the name of that particular newspaper. While this can still be done by just writing an article, when I wrote those articles there were numerous people that wanted to know who the writer was so they would not attack me/the writer of that particular roleplay newspaper, which would obviously influence the games experience by not being attacked by certain people or perhaps to instead be targeted by some people for writing any article about a their particular nation, even while in roleplay. So I think since you will always be known as the writer of anything you place from now on, that it can severely influence the amount of roleplay, diplomacy and just purely giving your opinion or chatting happening in the newspaper. For example while writing an roleplay newspaper, and posting it, you would not be attacked by some people or be called out for choosing a side while you are trying to neutraly report about how the ingame world is advancing.

      Like I said, I do agree with their reasoning why they removed the function, but I hope something can be done to re implement a similar function so we could continue doing these kinds of things. I'd also like to hear from people if they agree to what I wrote here and feel the same way, or maybe disagree with what I wrote.
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      The Best Defense Is A Good Offense.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by kittkarrkitt ().

    • It really is a loss indeed. For example you want to make other players aware of the fact that it is time to unite against a strong player who dominates the map but you don't want that player to know that it is you. Or you want two countries to go to war so you are the 3rd dog that runs away with the bone but there's no more possebilety to do it anonymously. In my experience as a moderator and Game Operator i haven't noticed much increase of abusement in anonymous articles. Also in their own name published articles had a lot of violations with the Terms of Service.
      BMfox
      Moderator
      EN Community Support | Bytro Gmbh

      Check out my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BMfoxCallofWar


      Found a bug or need help? Send a ticket here!

      The post was edited 1 time, last by BMfox ().

    • In my experience the anonymous articles weren't so bad at all actually. I just joined a new game and some people that just dont give a sh*t about their accounts which they can recreate within minutes, just started doing it anyway even without being anonymous. It might decrease the amount of cases in total which I really hope it will, but in my experience it has not had much effect so far. A return of the report button would also be appreciated actually.
      The Best Defense Is A Good Offense.
    • DoctorDR1 wrote:

      Unfortunately, while many people like you didn’t abuse it, there were just as many, if not more, who did abuse it, thinking they couldn’t be caught (which isn’t true).
      sad.

      I kind of abused it by spreading false info about myself. Anyone else ever try that? it worked miracles. All the times I sent armored cars to attack TDs in plains or infantry to defend against commandos in the mountains.
    • They are only policed when tickets are made. Unfortunately, many people don’t want to go through the hassle of doing that. In addition, we want to prevent violations before they happen, rather than publish offenders after the fact.
      DoctorDR1

      Game Operator
      EN Community Support | Bytro Labs Gmbh


      Click Here to submit a bug report or support ticket


      "Commander Cody, the time has come. Execute Order 66." -Sheev Palpatine
    • Since the tickets could only be policed by people making tickets about them, why did Bytro remove the Report/Ticket button right next to articles in the newspaper? They removed that a while ago and I saw bad articles get reported ALOT before they removed the funcion.

      People are still talking bad in the newspaper, and there is no way for us to report it within the game, which is probbely the reason why not alot of people report anymore. I think if the report/ticket button would be reinstalled, and maybe some other systems like an automatic (bad)word removal or blurring (Blacklist for certain words) would be added, that alot of people would report more or report would become less needed at all.
      The Best Defense Is A Good Offense.
    • Well if a chat filter is added then it could get pretty messy. If it’s one of those fancy learning AIs then that would require significant resources to develop and could end up raising false positives which in a game like CoW would make communication difficult to impossible based on the accuracy.

      Or if there is just a system that blocks certain words then it would still require dev time to code and would be easily bypassed by replacing characters with lookalikes or emojis.
      Ex. $ea ️ytro

      Overall a chat filter is a lose lose, you either invest way too much money and time to develop an Adaptive AI System that could end up rendering the game impossible to play with false positives or you end up spending dev time to create a system that trolls would easily work around. All that time and resources could be spent improving CoW.

      I don’t think the CoW dev team even have the resources or expertise to make an Adaptive Chat Bot. The only game I can think of off the top of my head that has an Adaptive Censor Bot is Roblox and thats only because the game has young children in it. I believe that this community can handle a few trolls and doesn’t need the same protection as 5 year olds.
      (The Roblox chat Bot wouldn’t even work for CoW because you can make death threats with it so it wouldn’t even prevent all the breaches of CoW ToS)

      And finally my last point. The more things you add to a complex system the more things that can break, this applies to CoW as well. If all the above problems are solved somehow a chat bot would still need maintenance and it would have the potential to crash CoW if there is a error in the Code or takes up too much processing power. Everyone always gets frustrated when the Severs crash for 15 mins because of some update or other reason now imagine everyone getting worked up because the chat bot of all things crashed the Severs, Now I’m no coder but AI system are complex and if there was an error in the code it could possibly take hours to find it depending on exactly how complex it is along with how many devs are in the office. With a small team like CoW it probably would take hours and in the end they would probably disconnect the Censor bot from the System so something like that wouldn’t happen again.

      (Just realized how much I wrote guess I got a little carried away)
      “If nature doesn’t kill us in the next few decades we will take matters into our own hands” -Habo778 (me)
    • DoctorDR1 wrote:

      In addition, we want to prevent violations before they happen, rather than publish offenders after the fact.
      I'm guessing you meant "punish", not "publish".

      By that logic though, you could disallow players from posting at all, or get rid of the newspaper, or stop running an online game - all of those things would prevent violations before they happen. In between the sarcasm, my point is removing useful game features because some people abuse them defeats the point of even having a game.
    • I understand the position that a chat filter is an expensive thing to develop. Of course, from the viewpoint that "there are no problems, only opportunities", it immediately makes me think there is a huge opportunity to develop an online chat filter and allow multiple applications to utilize it on a subscription basis. The cost would then be amortized over a large number of games and other applications where people need "clean" chat. It could even feature levels of tolerance to allow or disallow. Any venture capitalists listening? I'll develop it if someone will fund it.
    • Eye if you could get enough customers you could make a healthy profit but it would be difficult because you would have to make the tech highly compatible. This sounds like a risky business venture that would go a long time without generating profits and in order to get this off the ground your going to need to invest a large amount of resources that may never pay itself back. The main problem I see with this is integrating the filter into the actual games, I’m not a coder but a do know that you can’t fit a 6 inch wide pipe into a 4 inch wide hole without sanding it first.
      “If nature doesn’t kill us in the next few decades we will take matters into our own hands” -Habo778 (me)
    • Actually a simple interface would work - player writes chat, it is sent to the chat filter app, cleaned and sent back. All the filtering app needs to do is accept a chunk of text, clean it, and send it back. Part of the incoming packet would identify the customer (game app or whatever) so accounting can be done and the customer's preferences applied.

      The chief difficulty is making it multi-lingual. It could start out in a handful of widely used languages and then be expanded later to handle more.

      Certainly trolls would seek to circumvent the filter, but it could be updated as necessary and having one central filter would make it economical.
    • Well in order to think of the scale of this we have to look at other chat filters. And again I can only think of Roblox, they have this Learning algorithm that adapts to new ways people bypass the filter, while this certainly helps with maintenance it has to be monitored to insure that the amount of false positives remain within acceptable levels. The first question to ask here is whether to have manual input or develop a Leaning algorithm.

      But overall I’m fairly skeptical that this could succeed commercially. I’m closer to a businessman then a coder and I wouldn’t invest in this until I am sure that there would be a demand for such a service high enough to pay back development costs. So I would need to have companies and game devs say that they would be willing to pay for such a service since I don’t have any experience in that market as well as a rough estimate on how much funding would be needed until the Service would be ready to launch, basic stuff.

      Since most games that need a chat filter pretty much already have one the main consumer base would be New Games and games that want to expand into a younger audience but we could also sell to online forum sites or general chat services that want to have a more autonomous moderation process. Whatever capital you sink into this may not pay itself back for a while but over time as you get more and more clients plus you start getting a good rep, soon you can end up being the easy alternative to making your own chat censor and then your position will be cemented and you can watch the dough flow in.

      So that’s my armchair investor analyst, sorry if it sounded a bit like plotting world domination.
      “If nature doesn’t kill us in the next few decades we will take matters into our own hands” -Habo778 (me)
    • BeorntheBold wrote:

      Actually a simple interface would work - player writes chat, it is sent to the chat filter app, cleaned and sent back. All the filtering app needs to do is accept a chunk of text, clean it, and send it back. Part of the incoming packet would identify the customer (game app or whatever) so accounting can be done and the customer's preferences applied.
      There is already a chat filter in the newspaper. However, it isn't able to catch everything, which is why we have the wonderful GOs.
      DoctorDR1

      Game Operator
      EN Community Support | Bytro Labs Gmbh


      Click Here to submit a bug report or support ticket


      "Commander Cody, the time has come. Execute Order 66." -Sheev Palpatine
    • Players can still write articles in the game. They now just can't post misinformation or rulebreaks anymore under the cover of anonymity. Which is a very good thing in my book, reduces the amount of toxicity in the game. Personally I would have removed the anonymous posting even if we still had player report buttons in the newspaper.


      NoobNoobTrain wrote:

      Which shall it be? A game for kids or a game for men????
      I would argue that real men post stuff in their own name instead of hiding behind anonymity :P