The Future of DBD Moderation

[DodoSwarm]

I know several people noted the conveniency of moderating people on discord and reddit from the BHVR perspective (because you outright don't have to deal with them at all, you can just hand out an unfair ban with no reason and there's no realistic way for the banned person to even appeal it in a lot of cases), and BHVRs track record on the Forums for being extremely unfair with bans which made me think...

I think Cogsturning said something about this somewhere, I tried to find it for the sake of this post but couldn't remember where it was said, basically Community Discords may be entirely AI moderated soon. I kind of agreed with the point they were making at the time and moved on but then It reminded me of another situation with another very popular PvP game: League of Legends.

I Quit League of Legends years ago now right about the time that RIOT integrated Automod into the game to just outright remove peoples ability to communicate if they said anything containing a word or phrase the system had marked as "inappropriate" which couldn't be appealed, many of those bannable words or phrases were kind of moderate too... I understand autobanning people for saying extreme things but even text messages with contextual uncertainties would be caught in real time and issue immediate bans.

I say all of that to note a series of events... RIOT also shut down the League of Legends forums (although at least RIOT made them read only) in 2020, that's right about the time that automod started banning people in game... (Forums are, again, the best place to get in touch with REAL PEOPLE) and now, I just happened across a video where a highly ranked league of legends player (grandmaster) was automatically banned from not only communication, but from even logging in for a time because RIOT has integrated an AI officiated gameplay review system that detected the player in question was griefing... (The player was 5/0/23 and actively ending the game when the ban was rolled out). when that person appealed the ban they were only able to get in contact with an AI support assistant who told the player "the issue has been reviewed by a real person and the ban will stay in place" without any further information, so the person tried to resubmit it a few times to be met with a very similar message (from support "helpers" with different usernames too) after being frustrated they posted it on X and eventually got enough recognition behind it to gain direct attention from RIOT employees who reversed it, which kinda sounds like... RIOTs "Human verification team" isn't even human... people even noted weird things like possible intentional misspelling to seem like the bots are human on the support page.

I wouldn't be surprised to see DBD take this route at all. we're already getting the forums blasted next month, everyone knows how abysmal the in game report system is in BHVR. I play DOTA and when I report people on DOTA for griefing or slurs or whatever else, I hear back from the entirely human moderation team within a month at the very most, I rarely even hear back from BHVR, I have maybe heard back from them about reports five or six times (Been playing DBD since 2020)

So what does that look like? I know this is pure speculation but a move to discord as a forum instead of an already active existing forum while simultaneously nuking that forum rather than even leaving it as read only seems like a reasonable indicator that BHVR might just move in the direction of AI moderation in game as well. (The Sentiment that they're deleting the forums for "Monetary Reasons" kind of reinforces this also, since replacing employees with bots saves considerably more money). will we really see BHVR fall from a place where even if they are jaded and rarely listen, BHVR employees are actually available to be contacted to a pure AI system... I don't even think it's reaching too far into speculation to consider it...

BHVR is routinely called out for poor communication, unreasonable moderation, not listening to their playerbase, and especially inconsistency of game philosophy/design. with the last real platform of direct and coherent communication (the forums) removed, is it unreasonable to predict that BHVR will move in a direction barring any sort of player involvement or interaction regarding the development of the game?

[skittlesthehusky]

as unfortunate as it is, i think it is likely that this may be the direction that BHVR is going. more and more do i find patterns of reducing interaction between the community and the developers (or better or for worse). e.g: what was once "users can submit bugs and we'll review it as a team" has now turned into "submit a ticket in a third-party platform that is partially managed by ai, and we'll respond if the same bug has been reported multiple times".

given that AI is also beginning to be leveraged in their workflows, i wouldn't be surprised if they started to implement their own forms of automodding for chat messages and the like. we're already in a circumstance where simple or safe messages are randomly getting censored in-game with no real reason, and it's really inconsistent.

i'm just not a fan of how non-interactive BHVR has become. but again, this is something to expect out of a corporate entity. the only time individuals matter is if it brings profit or serves as a data point. the move to cut off any form of effective communication is intentional.

[TCH1990]

We will do a much better job on this forum when it comes to moderation, since you know we won't be using AI, but instead relying on actual human beings.
We are also vowing to do a better job than on the BHVR forums, in terms of being neutral and unbiased.