Overwatch Beta Begins Policing Players in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

[Shawn Zipay]

Tonight's update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive marks the start of the Overwatch beta. The Overwatch is a way for the CS:GO community to "regulate itself by allowing qualified and experienced members of the community to review reports of disruptive behavior, determine whether those reports are vlid, and apply temporary bans if appropriate."

Well, this is interesting.

The Overwatch FAQ for CS:GO was set up today to inform the masses just what is going to happen here and how you may be one of the lucky selected to dish out some fair justice.

What evidence is available to the investigators?
Investigators are presented with a replay of a randomly selected eight-round segment from an accused player’s match, and their task is to determine whether or not that player has committed any offenses during that replay. The suspect is referred to as “The Suspect” and the other players’ names have been replaced. All text and voice chat has been omitted. The investigator is expected to make a determination solely based on the actions of the suspect.

How does a player end up getting reviewed by an Overwatch?
The system contains replays of players whose pattern of being reported exceeds or otherwise stands out from those of their peers. They may have a sudden spike in reports, or they may have slowly built up many reports over a long period of time. Additionally, a player may appear in a test case replay that has previously received a not-guilty verdict. These are randomly inserted into a case load and are used exclusively to help the system score investigators (the verdict in test cases will not result in any action against the suspect).

What are the possible verdicts?
The possible verdicts are ‘Majorly Disruptive (cheating),’ ‘Minorly Disruptive (griefing),’ and ‘Insufficient Evidence’. Additionally, an investigator may choose to ‘Postpone’ a review and restart it at a later time without a resolution.

Investigators are selected based on their CS:GO activity (competitive wins, account age, hours played, Skill Group, low report count, and more. The more cases you're involved in as an Investigator, the more cases they can choose to participate in over time.

At the end of the case, the collective judgement will decide what happens to the offending player. The purpose of this beta is to fine tune the system. During the beta no results will go into effect until they are reviewed and analyzed by Valve first.

If you're a player causing trouble, be aware that [del]Big Brother[/del] Overwatch is watching you.

[K-16]

This sounds like VALVe took Riot Games' Tribunal feature and put it into Source games starting with CS: GO. Should be interesting to see, though I'm a bit surprised they're not testing this with DOTA 2 first (CS: GO has more players I guess?).

[Thortok2000]

I like this concept a lot, especially for games without dedicated servers and admins. Would love to see something like this in Call of Duty.

[jimykx]

I've heard a few people complaining about the Tribunal thing. They used this one: http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/tribu...e/964296/#nogo
as an example but I don't really understand what's going on in there and why they say it was unfair.

[Thortok2000]

I find LoL language hard to follow but in games 4 and 5 someone else was being the 'troll' and reported this person just because they didn't get along with them. In games 1-3 though the reported player was being pretty trollish themselves.

So 3/5, I would vote punish as well, so I don't see how that's an example.

[CptainCrunch]

Yeah, I don't know about all this. I like the idea and having people looking over things on top of VAC, which is what all games really need, but at the same time the haxusations are so outlandish I can see people that have good gaming rigs or multi-monitor setups being punished because their FOV is much larger than normal or you get that really good player that is just good getting banned all the time.

Granted, I don't know much about the system and maybe having people that do nothing all day but play the game (rich people, pros, and children out of school) be your judge and jury is a good thing.

This reminds me of the vote system in BF2 when I was an admin for our clan server. Another clan of about 8 came into our server one night and, because of their numbers, started vote kicking players and my own clan mates from our server. Fortunately I happened to be on and banned the entire clan from the server, but the damage was done for the night.

I guess my point is that if this is all public and anyone could view and decide and if they feel like camping a corner is total BS, well, guess what, you just got voted for being minorly disruptive. So your playing style will get you and you will either be forced to change it or stop playing the game.

I don't know, am I seeing that wrong?

[K-16]

I find LoL language hard to follow but in games 4 and 5 someone else was being the 'troll' and reported this person just because they didn't get along with them. In games 1-3 though the reported player was being pretty trollish themselves.

So 3/5, I would vote punish as well, so I don't see how that's an example.

I completely agree with Thortok2000. In roughly half the cases, he was requesting for others to report an annoying player (though telling others to report is actually frowned upon, since we can make our own damn judgement calls). In others, he was typing in all caps. I would vote punish as well, HOWEVER, I completely agree with the punishment being no more than a warning. I believe what he got was what he deserved, since he didn't actually do anything harmful beyond irritation at worst.

I've heard a few people complaining about the Tribunal thing. They used this one: http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/tribu...e/964296/#nogo
as an example but I don't really understand what's going on in there and why they say it was unfair.

jimykx, could you please provide us with a forum link so we can see with more context as to why people are using this as an example? I don't understand where the complaints are coming from.

Also, there is no LoL language to follow in these cases. Both teams are allowed to select which characters are not allowed to be chosen for that round (banning champions) in order to prevent their opponents from choosing characters that would put your team at a disadvantage. Other than that, they didn't really say much beyond English (support is support, Blitz is the shortened name of champion Blitzcrank, Rammus is another name of a champion, etc.). The stats below show no cheating took place, and basically anything purple is the suspect player. I don't see any need to see the all-chat as 4/5 cases reported are allies so really there's not much to read on it. This is why we would need a forum link to correspond with this example, so we know what the complaints are about.

The reason why I ask this is to see if the complaints on the Tribunal can also apply to VALVe's Overwatch system (I hesitate to say CS: GO Overwatch, because it may apply to other Source games as well, especially DOTA 2). In which case, would make pretty decent feedback for Overwatch to improve on.

I guess my point is that if this is all public and anyone could view and decide and if they feel like camping a corner is total BS, well, guess what, you just got voted for being minorly disruptive. So your playing style will get you and you will either be forced to change it or stop playing the game.

That's where the decoy cases come in. There will be cases where the suspect is completely innocent and the system already knows that (post-judged). If you abuse the system, you would theoretically vote on a randomly selected "good guy" case and any vote for punishment will be ignored AND lower the judging player's reputation, as well as lower their voting power. As this is a beta, no cases will have any punishments handed out, which also allows VALVe to monitor from a small sample on which "good guy" cases to mix BACK into the pool of actual pre-judged cases. If the beta passes, then it means VALVe trusts us and will allow "good guy" cases to automatically and randomly add back into the pool from our actions instead of their's. Remember, right now VALVe is double checking our work for all the right reasons. It's because we can create our own rules, that things get risky. Same goes for LoL's Tribunal. They have NO RULES to enforce, but rather going by what is socially acceptable, which has its risks.

[jimykx]

I don't really know. I saw someone on my facebook saying "Tribunal is getting more retarded with every passing day..." (Translated from portuguese) and I clicked the link to check it out. Curiously, a few hours after I saw this post here, so I shared it to see what you guys thought because I don't really understand what happened since I never played LoL actively.
But still, I remember one time where me and two friends entered a Track Mania nations server and banned a server adming just because of the server voting system... The admin was being an ass but what we did wasn't right either, but since the server alowed us to do that ow well...

[K-16]

I see. If that's the case then the complaints may be talking about wrongful punishment of the player, and possibly seeing other suspects within the same case (meaning somebody else should have been reported as the original suspect kept calling out for). I imagine they're saying players are poor judges and are either too strict or too blind at who is actually breaking rules, and who is merely being arrogant yet completely harmless. Probably unhappy with the whole "bandwagon" style of judgement. I found the judgement to be fair, namely because the player didn't actually have anything happen to him beyond a warning, and the player hasn't done anything to warrant a temporary ban (only 6 reports in 5 cases which is very few). Thank you for sharing jimykx.

This does give a potential issue with Overwatch possibly suffering from a "bandwagon" style of judgement as well, but obviously it's currently too early to criticize about that.

[spoiler=Not a spoiler, just my interpretation of each case if you REALLY give a rats @$$.]

• Case 1: They got obliterated within 23 minutes of the game and chose to surrender after a player went AFK. Key annoyances included the lack of preparation against invisible characters (pink wards are supposed to be used in key locations to reveal them), and having Blitzcrank constantly grab and kill them (suspect complained his team allowed the opposing team to select it instead of banning it). Blitzcrank has the ability to shoot his arm out like a fishing line and grab enemies from a distance as part of its ambush tactics. Anyways, suspect was reported for sucking (died only one more time than the rest of the team though).
• Case 2: As you can obviously see. Suspect was trolling with RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRs simply to piss off the opposing team, and clearly the player using the champion Nocturne was one of the people who reported the suspect. Though I do feel the player using Nocturne enabled the trolling by saying "dont press R pls."
• Case 3: Surrendered to another loss in 26 minutes due to bad team coordination. Once again, like Case 1, the team blames the suspect for not performing what was expected of him (the very specific way of playing League of Legends is known as the North American meta, where the mindset is that there's only one real way to play or you will instantly lose, although China and Korea uses different methods). What actually happened was everyone reported everyone. It was a freaking mexican standoff within the team from what I read in the chat logs.
• Case 4: Before the game started (during the champion selection screen), the suspect and possibly the rest of the team kept telling one teammate not to use the champion Zilean, because that player is forcibly assigned to a support role (and Zilean is not meant for support roles). When that player insists he/she is not good at being support and just wants to have fun, the suspect tells that player he/she should not play ranked games then (due to its serious and competitive nature). Game starts off with the suspect assuring his teammates now that the enemy team is revealed (opponents' champions are revealed at the loading screen prior to the match starting), as their opponents do not have any champions that can weaken enemies with temporary status ailments known as Crowd Control or CC (stun, snare, fear, slow, etc.). The suspect was also playing as Caitlyn, who is an ADC character or Attack Damage Carry (exactly what it says, specializes in dealing maximum damage and does most of the dirty work/major fights to carry the team to victory). Game won, but the player using Volibear kept threatening to surrender due to the player using Zilean doing incredibly poorly, and another player left mid-game for some obligation involving his girlfriend (apologized and left). Truth to be told, the player using Volibear should've been reported for such toxic behavior. The suspect was merely caught in Volibear's reporting rage. It didn't help that the suspect used all caps and discouraged a player from joining ranked games due to lack of adaptability, but overall the suspect is clearly innocent for this case.
• Case 5: Nothing special happened here. Just as the note says at the top, the suspect kept backseat driving everyone and blaming them for their faults. Blamed Fizz for poor equipment selection (you buy items during the match to upgrade your champion, and as part of the North American meta, you don't really have many choices as to what you want to customize with), blamed Talon for overall poor performance, and generally making sure everyone feels his frustration. For this case, I would've reported both the suspect and the player playing as Talon, as Talon was incredibly immature ("AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA") during that match. Fizz almost deserved a report, but I see that player as a victim of the suspect's backseat driving so just the suspect and Talon would be legit reports.

So as you can see, overall he did contribute to a rather unwelcoming community of players who frown upon those wanting to play differently, but overall he was on the receiving end of the bullcrap LoL players go through. So a warning to "play nice" is really enough given how little reports and cases were sent against him. I don't see a temporary ban being necessary at all, but no warning would enable him to continue being overly competitive to his teammates. There's nothing stupid that I can see from the Tribunal.[/spoiler]

[Thortok2000]

@ K-16, I've played a few games of LoL, not many, but the main abbreviation I wasn't getting was 'ss'

But I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I find it ironic that in game 4 he actually carried the game to a win and still got reported by his teammates when one of the teammates was much more of a troll than he was (that game).

A lot of trolls only come out to troll when the game is going downhill, so for that other guy to be such a jerk even for a win made the reported person seem pretty good in comparison.

[K-16]

Ah shoot I forgot to explain that one. Sorry, my bad. "SS" stands for the last two letters of miss, as in the enemy is missing and his or her current location is unknown. Basically players are in such a rush, that they want something shorter than "MIA" so they just type "ss mid/ss top/ss bot" to indicate which lane the enemies were last seen. Numbers can also be thrown in to indicate how many are missing, such as "ss top 2." Worth noting that it's not just the amount of letters involved, but also the positioning of your fingers when typing. "MIA" keys are farther apart and takes longer to press than smashing "S" twice.

[jimykx]