The griefing is overwhelming, something must be done.

[Nanako]

After three nights in a row playing this game, i can say with confidence, griefers are a huge issue.
Of course, they plague any online game, but they are particularly bad due to some issues with barotrauma.

1. People can dodge a votekick. I saw this tonight. A guy openly confessed to a griefing action that broke the sub in the previous round, everyone votekicked him, and he just left the server. then rejoined.
His vote count gets reset on rejoining. Of course we all voted him again.
And he left again, then rejoined again.
On the third go around, there wasn't time to gather enough votes, the round started and he hadn't successfully been votekicked.

He of course spawned as security, started gunning down everyone in sight, and sabotaged the reactor for good measure.

i am assuming that votekicking someone also automatically bans them for some period of time (It'd be worthless if this weren't true) and assuming this, votes should be kept on a player after they rejoin. Also it should be possible to keep voting for someone for some period (a couple minutes) after they leave, so people can't just leave to avoid being banned



2. People can't votekick dead players during a round.
You can votekick during a round, but only if the target is alive. This can help sometimes, but isn't useful against a suicide bomber who tosses a grenade at his feet for the lulz

The only time people can votekick is after the round ends which is a huge problem. Griefers can easily just leave before round end to avoid being voted, and they can act largely with impunity during a round, even respawning (and probably griefing the shuttle) after their shenanigans end with their death



3. The respawn shuttle is an easy victim.
About 80% of the time when respawning, someone opens the hatch early, flushing everyone out. Or smashes a front window. Or drives the shuttle straight into a rock.

The damage this causes can't be fixed because nobody spawns with the right tools, and there are no tools in the shuttle. There's a slim possibility of a mechanic and an engineer working together and having enough tools to repair the sub, but otherwise you're out of luck

I don't know what can be done about the last one, but the hatch at least needs fixed. The switch to open it is right there and nobody has a clue who pressed it
Start by having the hatch switch somewhere very close to it so that someone has to make an overt effort and at least reveal themselves in the process of opening it. Maybe add some time delay to it.

In general, setting a forced minimum time of 30 seconds for everyone to suit up, before allowing the shuttle to be moved or opened, would do wonders. Also add more O2 tanks in there, there definitely aren't enough. And sonars, flares, beacons too. These kinds of things are rarely used and this is the time when they are needed most


4. Reactor is too easy to sabotage
it takes less than 5 seconds to throw in an extra few fuel rods, or turn off auto and throw the dials up, or just unwire the generator so its power goes nowhere and the sub starves.

Very often, the reactor is in a semi public area where people pass through. it takes no time at all for any one of those bypassers to sabotage it as described above. It takes no skills from their jobs either, and no special tools aside from a screwdriver.

If this sabotage succeeds, the ship is ♥♥♥♥ed. With one tiny action everyone's day is ruined.
So how can you prevent it? Turns out that playing engineer is 80% Standing guard next to the reactor, you can't do anything but stand there all day, checking it every time someone passes, and occasionally frantically screaming about it when the inevitable griefer decides to take their shot


What can be done about this?
Skill requirements maybe.
Audio cues when someone changes things on the reactor (like turning off auto mode or inserting a fuel rod).
more animation so you can at least visually see when someone is opening the locker full of fuel rods next to the reactor
More time required for the reactor to overheat and go up in flames



5. Easy weapons.
I don't know where the ♥♥♥♥ grenades come from, but someone is getting ahold of them and bombing the sub in the first three minutes.
I don't know who or what spawns with a gun, but i've been frequently shot while on a respawn shuttle.
Security seems to be the job of choice for people who want to ruin everything, they can gun down everyone in their path.

Im not even gonna try to suggest solutions for this. I don't know. Its just broken, fix it somehow.



6. Lies
The worst of all
Griefers lie.
They'll shoot you in the face for no reason, and then scream unprovoked attack if you try to defend yourself. You can see them sabotage a machine and they'll just deny it. When someone screwams that X is murdering everyone, they'll feign ignorance while they continue gunning people down until its too late.

I don't think this can be solved in the heat of the moment, other than constantly running some screen recording apps.
but we probably need some way to bring them consequences after the fact. This is a paid game, global banning could have real impact.



Ultimately, griefing is the worst thing about this game. 80-90% of my playtime is spent defending against people who don't actually want to play the game, and seem determined that nobody else is allowed to either. They are destroying it

[Cringenormie]

I know that public servers can seem chaotic, but if you look for servers generally other than smoothtrauma with a discord link, they typically have friendly communities willing to actually play the game. Some examples that I'm apart of are Deep Divers RP, and Actionsub.

[Nanako]

And yet another game ruined, two metafriends joined as security and teamed up to gank everyone
https://i.imgur.com/2Twn9Kq.jpg

[Nanako]

Originally posted by Bruh:

I know that public servers can seem chaotic, but if you look for servers generally other than smoothtrauma with a discord link, they typically have friendly communities willing to actually play the game. Some examples that I'm apart of are Deep Divers RP, and Actionsub.

Gated communities have never solved societal problems.

As long as all this griefing exists, it presents a barrier that every new player has to deal with. And plenty won't. If i'm mad enough to make a thread, ill guantee there are plenty of others who just refunded after 90 minutes of constantly dying and nobody being able to do anything.

hiding from the problems won't fix them, and the game can't grow or prosper under this plague
I appreciate you trying to help, but these problems are largely mechanical. You can't fix people but you can at least not give them shiny "kill everyone" buttons within arms length.

I want to see the developers fix this mess

[Mort]

I think the Devs were hoping for a Space Station 13 type situation where griefing is controlled by mods on popular servers. This game literally provides everyone with access to ways to end a round within 5 minutes. Don't get me wrong I LOVE this game but I refuse to play on public servers. They have also the traitor mechanic like SS13 as well, but in BT it takes ZERO effort for someone to literally destroy the sub. SS13 is in comparison much slower and takes longer to build up materials to grief with. (Not in all cases, but in those situations moderators stop them/ban them) Also the stations are HUGE so griefing doesn't always affect the whole station.

I have hope for the game for sure, but I'm not sure how they could fix it. All I hope is that they continue to add to the campaign so my friends and I can continue to have a blast playing it together.

[Cdey]

Half of your points exist in-game.

You first point on vote-kicking is wrong. You can do it during the round. Hold tab and click on someone's name, and you get the option to do so. The only problem is that you can't exactly vote-kick if they're currently dead, since the player list only lists living players.

My first tip to you is play on a server that has a host or an admin active. They get logs on everything anyone does, from sabotaging the reactor to running around gun-ho. They can then ban them, wether they are in-game or not, using their steamID.
If someone unwires something like the reactor, it's just as easy to run a new wire back to the junction boxes. Unless they somehow unwired everything under everyone's noses, it's easy to fix.

If someone is spawning as security to grief, you yourself can spawn as captain or security and just cuff or shoot them as soon as you spawn. The captain gets a revolver with ~3 bullets, and security gets a stun baton + cuffs.

I won't try to defend the respawn shuttle part. I will agree that it is a huge problem with how easy it is to sabotage. Easy to get weapons are also a relatively minor issue that isn't a fault of the game, but rather the submarine designers. And I say minor because they are a necessity when it comes to intruders.

Lying is a fact of life, and of course they lie about it. But they can't lie to someone who has a screen that shows them every single thing they ever did during the round.

And really, the game JUST got a dev team, and came into early access. Give it some time, they have plans. The "gated communities" are temporary solutions for the time being.

**An experienced crew can figure out griefers are messing with things and can stop them while also repairing them with ease. But, I'll admit -- Experienced crews are hard to come by unless you play with friends.

[Atheist4ever]

@Nanako =^.^=
Mmm... let’s see how can we solve this, shall we? :>

1. Play on servers that are moderated, like Sodium, BT official and a few others.
2. WRONG
3. Get a different respawn shuttle cuz the defeault is trash
4. Get security to watch the generator at the start of every round
5. Only captain spawns with a gun, which is actually inferior to a stun baton, just make your way to the armory and arm yourself against ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
6. That is part of the game, noob.

Well that was easy :P!

[Regalis]

We are well aware that griefing is a big problem on public servers, and are planning on implementing more anti-griefing measures. At the moment it's one of our top priorities along with fixing the game-breaking bugs and implementing a way to host servers without the need for manual port forwarding.

I wrote a bit about this in another thread:

We've also been working on a "karma system" that will detect malicious actions and automatically kick griefers, and were actually originally planning to include it in the initial Early Access release, but unfortunately it's still a work in progress and won't be in the game until some time after the EA release. But I do believe once we have it fully implemented griefing will be much less of a problem.

It will of course be entirely optional and server hosts can decide how aggressively they want it to kick players.

We are also aware that some degree of "messing around" is a part of the game, and don't want to punish players for playing semi-harmless pranks on others. We also need to make sure that players don't get punished for doing honest mistakes or helpful actions that could be interpreted as malicious (such as intentionally flooding the sub to put out a huge fire). This is pretty much the reason why the karma system didn't make it to the EA version: it still needs more design work and testing to make sure it only affects obvious griefers.

In addition to this, we are also thinking of adding the option to disable rewiring and friendly fire (or damaging your crewmates in general). And I'd like to stress that this is optional - I know that a large part of the players, me included, would not want to disable these features. However, there's also a large number of players who would prefer not having to worry about getting shot in the face by their crewmates or having all the devices in the sub get unwired by someone.

Originally posted by Nanako =^.^=:

1. People can dodge a votekick.

Votekicking someone will automatically ban them for a period of time set by the server host. You should probably ask the host to increase the duration (or make the bans permanent) if you feel they can rejoin too easily.

Originally posted by Nanako =^.^=:

2. People can't votekick during a round.

You can, just open the info menu by holding tab.

[lay]

I give up, in almost 2 hours i haven't had one match without griefers and yes i'm aware what must be done in the submarines as the game is cracked and i had played it before but as of now i'm refund as it is impossible to play with randoms and the game is just too niche for common friends to even give it a chance

[Kara]

Personally, i host a game every night for 5-8 players, got the game for a week now. Havent had any issue’s regarding griefers. I just ban them or kick and usually the server fills up and the griefer cant join anymore.

However, in public server without admin/host, it is true.

[Database]

Some public servers are getting better with getting rid of griefers but they are never foolproof. I kinda do wish the karma system was done before EA release :/. Usually if you notify admins in these servers like BT Public, Sodium, and SmoothTrauma they can handle them.

[Nanako]

Originally posted by Mortraven:

I think the Devs were hoping for a Space Station 13 type situation where griefing is controlled by mods on popular servers. This game literally provides everyone with access to ways to end a round within 5 minutes. Don't get me wrong I LOVE this game but I refuse to play on public servers. They have also the traitor mechanic like SS13 as well, but in BT it takes ZERO effort for someone to literally destroy the sub. SS13 is in comparison much slower and takes longer to build up materials to grief with. (Not in all cases, but in those situations moderators stop them/ban them) Also the stations are HUGE so griefing doesn't always affect the whole station.

Yea the admin approach could work, but some effort should still be done in making mechanics more robust.

On an SS13 server you can overload an engine, but it usually takes a couple of minutes. And the engine is always in a restricted area that people can't just wander into.

in BT the engine is frequently in a hallway that people walk thought


And in space, of you wanted to open the doors on an escape shuttle, you'd at least need a screwdrivers, multitool/wirecutters, and a crowbar. You'd have to fiddle with the door for a few seconds and people could notice.
Here its one button that anyone can stealthily click :(

[Nanako]

Thank you regalis, and its comforting to hear about these plans.

One point of confusion here

Originally posted by Regalis:

Originally posted by Nanako =^.^=:

1. People can dodge a votekick.

Votekicking someone will automatically ban them for a period of time set by the server host. You should probably ask the host to increase the duration (or make the bans permanent) if you feel they can rejoin too easily.

What i meant there, is that people can dodge a votekick by leaving before enough votes are gathered to kick them. The vote doesn't go through.

They immediately leave and rejoin which resets their vote count to zero, so everyone has to vote again.
Its hard enough to coordinate a bunch of players into all voting for one griefer. When they can just shrug off the accumulated votes like that, actually kicking someone is near impossible

As far as i'm aware, votekicking works fine if you actually gather enough votes to reach the target. The problem is hitting that target in time

[Girthquake]

Originally posted by Regalis:

We are well aware that griefing is a big problem on public servers, and are planning on implementing more anti-griefing measures. At the moment it's one of our top priorities along with fixing the game-breaking bugs and implementing a way to host servers without the need for manual port forwarding.

I wrote a bit about this in another thread:

We've also been working on a "karma system" that will detect malicious actions and automatically kick griefers, and were actually originally planning to include it in the initial Early Access release, but unfortunately it's still a work in progress and won't be in the game until some time after the EA release. But I do believe once we have it fully implemented griefing will be much less of a problem.

It will of course be entirely optional and server hosts can decide how aggressively they want it to kick players.

We are also aware that some degree of "messing around" is a part of the game, and don't want to punish players for playing semi-harmless pranks on others. We also need to make sure that players don't get punished for doing honest mistakes or helpful actions that could be interpreted as malicious (such as intentionally flooding the sub to put out a huge fire). This is pretty much the reason why the karma system didn't make it to the EA version: it still needs more design work and testing to make sure it only affects obvious griefers.

In addition to this, we are also thinking of adding the option to disable rewiring and friendly fire (or damaging your crewmates in general). And I'd like to stress that this is optional - I know that a large part of the players, me included, would not want to disable these features. However, there's also a large number of players who would prefer not having to worry about getting shot in the face by their crewmates or having all the devices in the sub get unwired by someone.

Originally posted by Nanako =^.^=:

1. People can dodge a votekick.

Votekicking someone will automatically ban them for a period of time set by the server host. You should probably ask the host to increase the duration (or make the bans permanent) if you feel they can rejoin too easily.

Originally posted by Nanako =^.^=:

2. People can't votekick during a round.

You can, just open the info menu by holding tab.

You guys released this game much too early. You should have finished more of the planned features and then people wouldn't be so upset about the griefers or maybe even the price tag.

[webmaster]

I think it should do the job if you could set the voterate for like 50% or 40% so thats enough votes results into a ban. And setting options in time or forever on this server.

[Girthquake]

Originally posted by webmaster:

I think it should do the job if you could set the voterate for like 50% or 40% so thats enough votes results into a ban. And setting options in time or forever on this server.

I think you can do that via the serversettings.ini