Work In Progress Vote Kicking Disabled Temporarily

This is quite possibly one of the silliest game additions that I have seen so far. Who on the dcuo team got kicked from an instance to make this such a key priority in comparison to some of the other MAJOR gameplay issues? All kidding aside I personally have 17 toons currently running content at the t6 level, so trust me when I say that I have been kicked from many instances for no good reason whatsoever and I empathize with the others who face this. However not allowing players to be democratically removed from an instance by a group majority vote will prove more problematic than the alternative. In example earlier today during an LFGed HoH run during the final encounter with Cerberus our tank was politely asked if he could come out of the corner a bit so that the handler would not be trapped behind Cerberus and his response was "F you I know what I'm doing and I'll tank him wherever the F I want". After failing again he was politely asked again to please revise his stratedgy, and again his response was less than cordial. Long story short when asked to please leave the instance so we could get another tank and finish his response was "FU MFER KICK ME...OH WAIT YOU CAN'T" after which he must have set down his controller and walked away. Needless to say you need a tank for the instance and we ended up disbanding. We all get kicked from an instance from time to time for bogus reasons but IMO getting rid of the vote feature is a a terrible option and there are probably more important in game issues that the dcuo teams valuable time and resources could be spent on.

just seen people before in instances being idiots cause they can be.

likely outcomes of all this.

pugging with randoms is finished. as is my help/assistance for them. its just not worth the risk of getting a ****** player.
only grouping with leagues or familiar players, more exclusion.
less content running
less time in game

This is just ridiculous. Ive been in 2 raids already that was hijacked by 2 different people. I really hope they change this back ASAP cause it is doing more harm then good

Brilliant, Hope that solves the two faces.

Edit: You know the ones that purposely disconnects.

Just going to say this once, and I hope it sticks because I feel 100% that the problem with vote kicking in DCUO is the direct result of the following, and until the following has been corrected itself, the issue has nothing to do with social engineering fix attempts and more so with a flawed system design that has allowed the circumvention of other MMO balancing staples that were designed to be far too flexible in DCUO (and thanks for trying to give players these particular freedoms, but as is the trend with gaming, if it can be exploited, it will, and with MMOs that happens up the wazoo).

The core of the problem
1) The big bad #1 reason - there is absolutely nothing in place to restrict a queued player from staying locked into the role they agree to play. We currently have the option in our gameplay settings to flag 'role optional' alert queues off, so that you are flagging this so if you yourself want to play >ONLY< with a balanced alert group of 1 damage dealer, 1 controller, 1 healer and 1 tank. Even after flagging this option it's still entirely possible for a double role queue player, aka big fat %*#&(*% liar, to stay in the role opposite of what the server tells them to play when the mission is finally ready to initiate. Headaches ensue - not every time, but enough times to really spell out the inconsistency with the game's grouping mechanism. This feature should similarly apply to raids, where a system by the 2's is enforced, or at the very least a system where at least 1 of each role type is present.

The system also needs to lock players into these roles. The only time 'switching' should be temporarily available again is if somebody exists the group and completely leaves the instance. During this time period, I propose the following: Unlock the role stance feature for any player that has a power type that can play the missing role. IE: you lose your tank and one of the damage players is a tank power type and can thus switch roles. Once that switch is made, matchmaking (which would still be ongoing at this time) refreshes and updates to accomodate the missing slot with potential for a new damage dealer.

Additional feature: Say you want to run a raid with a particular group composition. Players should have the option of inivitating a 'seek' system through matchmaking that will allow the current group leader to open up the instance for matchmaking one player at a time, by role. That sounds somewhat confusing, but it'd work like this...

Players walk into a raid or queued up and the instance starts. A player is assigned the group leader if the group wasn't already pre-formed, as is currently normal. If the group initiated full, but then loses a member, or if the group walked in but was not full, the group leader can initiate an overriding instance 'open' option called 'seek role' or something similar. This will allow the group leader to initiate matchmaking for 1 additional player at a time by role/stance; damage, controller, healer or tank. Matchmaking will 'seek' this one player type, locking their stance when they join the instance. Matchmaking will not automatically continue to fill in empty spots. The instance must be voted to 'open' again, or the leader can initiate another seek. Any time seeking is started, if not a 'role optional' instance, stance switching will be locked as to not confuse the system during the process and create unwanted stance/role duplicates, etc.


2) CR is not the end all of progression based gameplay. It's absolutely not. CR is also not by any means an indication of player skill. Content difficulty and content balancing vary widely because the actual group performance of a mission, start to finish, has too many non-controlled factors that add up to offer all to wild gameplay experiences for people. CR should not be the only qualifying factor for entering instances. Suffice to say SP do matter, and a properly spec'd group of adequately accomplished players with a higher avg SP is going to potentially do far far better than bargain bin players that bring down the group averge by quite a bit. This said, SP alone aren't going to cut it, as they can be improperly spent on off-role specializations that could bring down performance as well. A base SP requirement for each tier of content should be added, but the CR requirement needs to be tuned to reflect ONLY the role appropriate gear that maches what the player has flagged up as in matchmaking. IE: It doesn't matter if your power type can play tank or damage if the player only has damage gear. That's not a legitimate tank, and the absence of this criteria only makes it all the much more difficult to balance content and makes it just as much more difficult to push players to 'want' to actually obtain specialized gear sets.

A different approach to this as well:
Disregard a CR and SP requirement. Instead, display listings for base stat requirements for role specific stats. IE: A player flagging in as damage will see a list requirement appear on their instance duty selection screen that shows requirements for precision and/or might (one exceptionally high stat over the other will override the other and switch from a red number listing to green, indicating a pass on this damage oriented stat set), defense and health (you need x minimum to survive a one-shot attempt on the player if the player is blocking). Similarly for a tank, a base defense, health and dominance requirement would display. For controllers, defense, health, vit and dominance. Healers, defense, health and restoration. Base value requirements would reflect what's acceptable in accordance with the various ways a player can 'tier up' through each DLC/episode.

Overall, either of these is going to push players into specializing for the role they intend to play, allowing for content design and balancing to factor in much less varying in player style. Groups that refuse to run with balanced groups have only themselves to blame here. If a player otherwise meets entry criteria, they should be entirely capable of completing their functions in the group.

Additional handicap feature:
You're not always going to have a balanced group. Thems the brakes. If you have one tank, one healer, one controller and they're simply 'at level', and the raid party ends up with 3-5 damage players, the system can compensate by buffing the solo role players to accomodate for the lack of a 2nd like supporting player. The damage players will have a percentage, increasing with as many roles as there are like players, of their damage output per hit/tick of damage reduced. If you have no choice but to run content with a ridiculous party composition, this will help the server make sense of the dynamic in order to maintain the base expected difficulty of content. And that brings up to #3...


3) Lack of stat clamping. This, a source of a dozen and one OTHER problems outside of vote kicking, has only enabled groups to kick players they don't believe can carry their own weight, or more than their fair share of weight, from content. Chief among related problems, the speed at which players can progress with gear, currently the only bar for entry into instanced group content (outside of the leveling alerts) causes a great drop in player skill for higher end content, which brings forth cries for nerfing content and so forth, and related vote issues. This should absolutely not be something to negotiate with.

Stat clamping is a must. Content has been made into an absolutely un-fun mockery of what it once was in all group content (aka core of an MMO). Stat scaling is ridiculous and this really should have been answered a very long time ago. A new player wanting to see their character progress through content and rise to anticpated challenge commonly has that stolen away from them by a player just a tier or two higher than them one-shotting enemies. Who the heck is going to want to take the game seriously at that point? Who the heck is going to want to keep playing and invest time (and more importantly, money) into a game that supports this insanely bonkers system that's not only being detrimental to players wanting to be adequately challenged to make the content worth running/re-running, but also to all those players that are thus carried and are that much more encouraged NOT to spend money on particular purchases as results would be proof enough they won't have to.

"Oh hey, you can't carry me? $*&^ you, i'm just going to sit in this corner here and do nothing."
"Oh hey, you want to kill everything before I get a chance to punch a target? Okay, $*&^ you, i'm just going to sit in this corner here."
"Oh hey, I thought this was an MMO. $*&^ me, I guess it's not."

Enough is enough. It's gone on for far too long and the community has only brought itself down further in the process. This is not an ordered community by any means, and I think cross platform play is going to alienate a lot of people because of it.

Stat clamping needs to be done in one or two stages, depending on the tier. Some tiers don't have a ridiculous variance in stat scaling between what gear is available in the tier, while other tiers vary quite a bit. For those that are more simple, IE: Tier 1, 2 and 3, stat clamping should clamp stats on an over-geared character to what would be the highest available stats for gear acquired in Tier 3 content. In tiers 4, 5, 6, and likely 7, gear stats will require 2 stages. What you can do with T6 scaling speaks for itself. :S

That's the jist of it. (also all I have time for) Correct these issues voting can return with far less trouble. You'll still get morons wanting to be carried, but I think adding a mission countdown timer to instances can also work when coupled with the above. That in itself sets up a group attitude prerequisite from the start and pulls in efficiency that's being quite elusive in DCUO's groups to date.

Looking back at previous suggestions I will have to say that I agree with 50%+1 majority vote suggested by SpiderCrow to be the best possible solution to this "problem", I don't know by this as not the implemented standard from day one. IMO it just makes the most sense to me.

I personally like this idea. I'm trying to do my best as a controller, and I'm still learning, yet when I'm in Raids, no matter how hard I try, sometimes I will get booted for the dumbest things. Once I was booted because they didn't like how I looked. Another time I was booted because I wasn't doing the job the way one person wanted, even though I WAS doing my job. Another time, while in the process of getting my gear to where it needs to be I was booted because 2 of my items were DPS gear and not Controller gear. People abuse this WAY too much. The fact of the matter is that if people didn't abuse the kick ability, this wouldn't be an issue. Nobody should be kicked when they're trying to learn and figure things out.

I've ran a few instances today, incognito, as a low CR Fire Tank, playing in Tank stance and gear. Rather than theorise what might happen, I thought I'd see just how bad it was and to be honest, it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I ran Oan Sciencells, League of Assassins Stronghold, Arkham Asylum and several Duos.

Honestly, no issues encountered so far. Nothing major at least. There was one CR77 player who was far too overzealous, leaving us to fight NPCs in Arkham Asylum whilst he sat outside the Mr Freeze boss fight room, doing the "Sleep" emote. ****. But nope, no complaints, nobody dicking around refusing to run content.

One gentleman who was CR113 and helped me run the Penguin duo (again via a random queue in the On Duty menu) even went as far to say I did a nice job, even though he obviously didn't need me. Very uncharacteristic of EUPS where nobody talks to anybody else and rarely emote each other too.

I'm not seeing all the doom and gloom so far. I expected a terrible experience. But nope. The only negative experiences I have with PUGs tends to be high CR elitist pricks who feel as though they're better than everyone else because of their CR and that they're DPS. These players seem to be more of a problem than noobs.

Will keep experimenting.

So...a troll decided to be rude to our whole group in Halls of Hades, while we were at the final boss, and claimed he was gonna leave. Instead of leaving, he stuck around for close to 20 minutes, trash talking and gloating about the lack of the kicking option, and finally left.


Please bring back the kicking option. This was a huge waste of our time and could have been avoided with a simple kick.

You could always run the 2-2-2-2 setup with players who can play both roles, and if one decides to be a jerk, you can 7-man it by having one player switch to the role needed to complete it (since any role but maybe DPS can run solo with Cerberus).

Had the chance to experience the system without vote kick in place. I think it's given players a lot more headaches than benefits. Below is an example of a scorecard from FOS1 with an appropriately geared (Around cr50-60) group. The lowest DPS on that card stayed with us and was fighting however the DPS given was extremely bad. The DPS was CR61 with 71k damage out for the entire raid and was outdps'd by 2 trollers and a healer even.

This is the case where kicking needs to be allowed. Where performance is extremely below acceptable rates. I'm definitely on the "We need actual meters" in this game instead of scoreboards but I think the scoreboard here told the truth just fine.

I agree. It has been so nice to play today without any of the kicking drama. Thanks for making the game friendlier, devs!

So you beat the instance, and you are angry that you didn't get to kick someone who didn't meet your expectations on the Scorecard?

Wow. SMH

Thank you. There are too many people in this thread that totally discount the very truth of other players being unfairly kicked, and I believe that's due to them personally having a good experience. While its good that there are people who have not experienced unfair vote kicking, it is completely ignorant to discount the other side. I personally have been kicked from instances unfairly, once from Security Breach while I was the top in Damage Out (as a DPS) on the scoreboard, and the vote was started by two new players who had just entered the instance.

I won't deny the player griefers and freeloaders (which I have not personally experienced), the disconnects and linkdeads (Honestly, this does happen quite often), and other negative consequences of the vote kicking being disabled. Those are extremely important issues, however the abuse of vote kicking is VERY real, and occurs more often than people think.

I like Lord Raiden's suggestion. Perhaps if everyone in the group voted "yes", voting abuse would be mitigated, however I would like to add that I have also seen other players unfairly kicked, and for some reason, it seems that people will vote "yes" to kick anyway without even considering a reason. Almost like a domino effect of sorts, and the player being kicked has no say-so.

My thoughts.

My experience has been similar to yours. I've had a really fun time today. I actually raided for the first time in a long time, and there weren't any problems. Everyone got to play, everyone contributed, no one got kicked.

And I agree with you that in my experience as well the main problem in the community tends to be high CR elitist pricks, not the hated "noobs", etc. Most people play games to have FUN. A small vocal minority of the "diehard MMO" crowd play for other reasons. One only needs to see the comment openly said to me upthread that they hoped that I would be bullied to see their motivation.

It is really kind of funny. It isn't that I personally fear being bullied that makes me avoid the kick-kabuki drama when the kick feature is enabled. It is the fact that I get really angry when I see other players being bullied, and it ruins my evening. When I was little my dad started coaching baseball when he encountered some bigots that wouldn't let some little black kids play ball on their teams. Ever since then I get really angry when I see scumbags preventing innocent people from getting to play a game for stupid, petty, reasons. I really hope that the kick feature is kept turned off permanently. Most online games don't have kicking, and it isn't needed here either.

Personally I think that the problem with this community is that nobody fears consequences of bad etiquette. Aside from hacking the servers, the worst thing you can do in the game is cheat/exploit it's glitches. When that happened recently a very poor, unthreatening punishment happened. In the past, nothing has happened. If the devs aren't punishing people for doing something so bad, then what hope is there of getting people to behave respectably towards each other in the rest of the game?

Reporting someone is a long, difficulty process, so people feel as though they can get away with treating others like ****. There's very rarely any consequences for this. There's also a perception that Customer Support do nothing, which seems to give people a sense of invincibility.

There's no consequences for standing in an instance doing nothing. There's no consequences for kicking players. More often than not, nothing is done in regards to scamming. It's like the Wild west out there and as a result, you have a very toxic, elitist community.

It's not really what the devs want to hear. Especially at a time when costs are being tightened... but I feel as though they need to develop some sort of goodwill system to encourage good behaviour and punish bad behaviour. I feel it's the only way, because right now it's extremely toxic and those who spread the toxic are never punished, which makes people who are normally good natured turn to the "dark side" because it's the only way to survive.

DCUO attracts casual gamers rather than hardcore gamers because by it's nature, DC Comics is a very casual license, unlike games such as WOW and FF14, which attract a much more "Professional" crowd because their lore isn't a casual brand. With this comes a whole bunch of people who don't really get gaming and have no etiquette online because they don't fear the consequences of doing something wrong when nobody real is around to witness it.

I don't really know much about video games development, but I would say that action is going to needed to be taken as the community has got progressively worse since DLC7. That's when I noticed things started getting bad and now the new players who weren't here for that are learning the bad habits which is basically becoming the standard in game.

Yes the scorecard did tell the truth. You finished the raid in under 40 mins so no one NEEDED to be kicked.

There's a difference between lofty expectations being enforced and herp derping your way through content because you know you can't get kicked. 70k dps in an FOS run in which you are appropriately geared is awful performance. I think I would actually have to try to get that low of DPS and I personally didn't think it was possible.

He was outdps'd by someone using a cr42 controller weapon with only weapon attacks while more than doubling their output in a stat that isn't even spec'd... Please tell me my expectations are out of bounds. The thought of someone even thinking that is "Ok" makes me laugh like Joker. Uhhhuhuhhuh HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Maybe Afk players can be kicked as well like the disconnected.

I agree with this.

I tried tanking for the first time the other day in an alert. It's taken a lot of effort to get me to that stage because I HATE running content knowing that the tiniest mistake will result in me being kicked or insulted or something. It didn't go bad, to be honest. Not perfect, but I didn't die, which I guess is the whole point. Still, I was on edge.

Today, I tried the content again, as tank, at required CR and it was a much more comfortable experience. I enjoyed it. I didn't feel I was watching over my shoulder every time an NPC spawned. It was good and I got some good practice in.

The worst experiences for my runs today were that 2 high CR players melted LOA without giving me much of a chance to do my thing in there. The other was a CR77 DPS in Arkham Asylum speeding off ahead. Both negative experiences were by players, cocky, arrogant and thinking they're better than everyone else because they had better gear. I think most of the problems people experience in this game are by people like that.

That's what happens when you get to end game, though. You get suckered in to the toxicity and treat everyone how they treat each other in the end game.