Becoming a Moderator

Forza Motorsport Legacy Motorsport
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Hello all,

I was wondering what it takes to become an in game moderator. As for the forums it seems like that is perfectly under control. But as my self and many others agree, we need more moderators in game.

First question, can anyone become a moderator? Or do you have to strictly already be part of turn 10s staff? If so that rules it out right away.

Second question, if there is a way to become a moderator, is there any applications, website, or someone we can email to apply to become one?

These are the basic questions. Hopefully another moderator or turn 10 staff could reply to this and provide some information.

I see someone as my self a perfect candidate to moderate the online hoppers. I would say I am on forza for a minimum of 6 hours every day of the week. Keep in mind, i said minimum, normaly I’m on a lot longer then that. I don’t play 6 hours at once obviously but split it up during the day and night. Sometimes I will play 5 hours straight with just a few 15-20 minute breaks in between. I normally play for about 5-6 hours during week days from about 2-3 pm to 8-9pm. I spend most of my time racing online in public hoppers with my friends. Although you may have seen me say on the fourms I never play in public, that was simply because I was angry with the lack of moderation, the kick button etcetera and just trying to make a point. I would say 80% of that time I am racing in public lobbies. I am a very clean and also very fast racer. Yes mistakes happen and that’s just a part of racing. I’m also faster then everyone in the lobby 99% of the time, so yes mistakes happen navigating through traffic.

This could be solved by public custom lobbies but it will never happen for this game so stop asking, maybe fm7 it will. We still have a very long time until the next forza motorsport comes out. We still have a bunch of time for moderator improvement and to try to make the game a better experience for everyone.

Anyway, I don’t want to drag this on any longer. I will leave this up to forum moderators. I thought this would be an appropriate post for the forums so people like me who have a bunch of free time on their hands, could see if they can try and help out the community in some way with lobby moderation.

Also forgot to add in, I’m not sure if moderators get payed or not. I am assuming they don’t. Just want to point out that my self and I’m sure many others would happily do this for free, we don’t need to be paid just to play a game we enjoy and moderate it on the side.

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As far as I know the only role non Turn 10 employees can play is send the replay in.

Nothing more.

I think what you are talking about is a suggestion of how to handle the situation because to my knowledge the role of online moderator does not exist but Turn 10 employees happen to play that role.

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Yes that is what I mean, I wanted to know if a regular person can moderate on the game. But I guess as you just stated, only turn 10 employees can have that role. That was my first question. Ah well (sigh) that’s a let down. I really hope in the future they can implement in game moderator roles by the people of the public. We need more of them other then the turn 10 employees and to be honest I’m sure the consumers (players) that play in online hoppers play a lot more time then they do. There’s only one turn 10 employee who actually plays a lot in public lobbies and that is jonk. Last time I saw him he was a level 700 something. Also I can only think of 4 turn 10 employes and jonk is the only one that plays a lot online in public lobbies.
There is Triton, Jonk, Mechberg and Johnni wanna. I’ve never even seen triton or Johnni wanna (not sure how his gt is spelled) in a lobby.

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There are considerable legal issues preventing such an thing from ever taking place. Microsoft is never going to agree to unpaid volunteers exercising editorial control over the paid service of other customers and they would be fools to ever entertain the notion.

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Moderators, who are all volunteers, are selected by Turn 10. You’re asked, after contributing, being helpful and being a long-time forum member.

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Thank you for providing info snow owl. But does such a role as Eduardo stated exist? I know all fourm moderators are volunteers as I’ve seen you stated that before in a different post. I wanted to find out if there are volunteers similar to fourm moderators but instead in game. Or do you have to be a part of turn 10s staff to play a moderating role for in game purposes?

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I think the answer is we all have a role to play - send in replays of deliberate crashers.

There are reasons as stated by Hieronymous why that is the limit of what we can do.

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I’m not really sure about the leagal issues. For example there is twitch. You can pay $5 to subscribe to someone, then you write something stupid in the chat and moderator can time you out for a few minutes or even worse ban you from the channel completely. Then there goes your 5 bucks. I would think the same think applies here. You’re breaking Xbox live terms and conditions by crashing into people on purpose, cutting corners and other misconduct. I’m not sure who handles actually putting a ban on an account but I know snow owl handles all the replays. But when they put bans on accounts it’s the same principle, they payed for the game but they get a temporary ban. Instead of constantly sending Snowowl replays, which takes a lot of time out of both the player and snow owl, you can just remove a player from a lobby like the turn 10 staff does. And all your doing is removing them from the lobby, it’s no harm done, it’s not like your banning them from the servers for a week or a month. Honestly sending replays is kind of big hassle and half the time someone is causing havoc I don’t even bother sending the replay. I’ve only ever sent in about 5 or 6 reports to snow owl. If I actually reported them all I would probably be at about 20-25 by now.

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In all cases the action is taken by Turn 10 staff. And from a post written by a Turn 10 staff member bans are only dished out by certain Turn 10 staff members not all of them. One of them posted that they did kick someone from a lobby for doing the wrong thing but they did not have the ability to ban people.

Unless we are lawyers we can not really say too much about legal stuff.

But on twitch what is the sub for - you actually are not guaranteed anything in return and you do not need to pay in order to get twitch viewing or even chat posting privileges. So the ban is not depriving you of something you paid for. A ban here is, so I believe there are a select few who know exactly what proof they need and what rules need to be broken before they put the ban in place.

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You couldn’t have members of the playing public act as judge, duty and executioner in online gaming. This couldn’t happen for several reasons. Some obvious and some not so obvious.

You could however have members of the playing public help “police” lobbys to try to discourage bad mouthing, disruptive behaviour and so on. Sometimes just the presence of players with the ability to advise others that they could face being reported and potentially banned may be enough to help “clean” things up a little. Perhaps a Gamertag icon or something to make them obvious.

The difficulty of course is that these players would have to play impeccably to carry any credibility.

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You would think that what make people play better but honestly it doesn’t. It sounds like a good idea on paper but it won’t work. I’ve been in a few lobbies with jonk lately with his turn10 badge and people still drive the same way. You’ll still have people who wreck you on purpose even with them in there. To be honest I don’t think half the people who play the game even know what the t10 symbol next to their name even means, only the people who visit the forums know this.

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Wizard is right in that the T10 glyph isn’t really a deterrent against bad behavior in lobbies. The T10 glyph next to my gamertag is an optional choice for Turn 10 employees (or Playground Games glyph in Horizon games for us and our friends at PG). There are some benefits to it, but also negatives. Many T10 employees don’t want the glyph, even though it does come with the 1 Vote Kick power, which comes with great responsibility - as well as the potential for backlash from players don’t believe they deserved to be kicked no matter how egregious their behavior. If you could see the messages I get …

Remember that none of us are game “moderators” - we’re game developers and gamers. I get as frustrated as the rest of you guys from getting wrecked, especially in leagues where sim damage is often catastrophic. I may groan about it, but will rarely kick someone for it. Someone really has to be ruining the lobby for everyone for me to do that, which is of course a lot more common in public hoppers.

Most of the time, wrecks are racing mishaps where no one person is clearly to blame, or it’s caused by overly aggressive driving or poor spatial awareness, etc. Who was at fault in incidents like these can be debated till we’re all blue in the face, but not usually grounds for a kick or a ban request. If I repeatedly see that kind of thing, I’m more inclined to send them a live message asking them to keep it clean than to kick them.

Revenge wrecking and deliberate corner cutting is another common issue, both deserving of a ban IMO (and which I don’t have the power to do, by the way - I have to report people like the rest of you do, I just have a faster method of doing it).

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I think the issue is that some people believe they can do what they like. I am sure some people know who they are racing against and they deliberately take out the Turn 10 staff thinking nothing will happen to them.

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The fact that Vote to Kick is woefully ineffective also encourages this; I seem to remember previous titles having cleaner races because the worst offenders would get removed from a room almost immediately.

Reporting is all well-and-good, but sometimes I’d rather just have that person kicked before I start the next race.

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My only issue with the system as is, is that you can only save 10 replays at a time. This makes it difficult to do any policing from a user standpoint. As you have to keep the replays up until someone has had time to look at them. So it’s quite limiting. Other than that people really do need to report misbehaviour whenever and wherever they see it. :slight_smile:

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There is that issue with vote to kick, but i think that’s more a side effect of less players. After Forza 5 many people left the community and haven’t returned. I have many friends who no longer play Forza because of design changes etc.
With fewer players, even if you kick someone, they’ll end up back in your lobby because there’s literally nobody else about. lol
I think that’s more a problem with the way Xbox Live works on the one compared to the 360 as well, as it happens in some others games where the same idiot keeps re-appearing. lol
At the end of the day, reporting is really all we can do. I know it doesn’t feel like enough, but if everybody does it, the griefers will be removed.

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Hi,

While i was reading here about the vote-to-kick-system came an idea how it could improve itself.
By just adding a little menu with the GT shown how many votes they have. Highest bid wins.
A second step should be a consistant counter for each player like the save game or tunings-setup.
The counter than would be used as controlling.

About the moderation in lobbies, i think its not that easy caused by the ingame-chat
(mechanical robot voices).
Party-chat on XBLive is a common way to communicate so it’s splitted. A live moderator then also
needs to watch the hole race without racing, to look through the field what’s going on
(loadingtimes between the switch from one to the next player), may save the replay (limited amounts
of save).
So far it is not that hard to have the chance to be realized. On a famous streaming plattform “Fail’s”
has been created as a compilation and the best were exhilaranting. Replays in a good condition
helps here. This in addition can be added to forza/tv.

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@JONK1969
As a developer and a player of the game, what direction would you like to see taken within the game to help curb the bad behaviour? As a developer, do you have any say or input into features or game mechanics?

Just curious is all, I’ve always had the impresion that all those sorts of decisions were made by a committee (directors and so on) that are a bit less passionate about the actual game as the rest of us

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A controller that gives you an electric shock when you cut corners, plow into the back of a car, or knife someone in a corner (kidding).

As a developer I can’t divulge the myriad of things we’re considering to improve online play - some may pan out, some may not - but from a player’s point of view I can say what I would like to see not just in Forza, but in any competitive game. In general, I think a game should teach and reward good behavior, and it should punish bad behavior appropriately in both solo play and especially multiplayer. It should also empower its community of online players to reward others for good behavior, and punish them for bad behavior with simple tools for reporting both (and fact-check these against some basic game telemetry to ensure fairness before issuing reward or punishment).

There are a lot of ways to go about this, and none of them are easy, silver bullet solutions. I can say that we’ll keep working the problem to get closer to the goal of clean and fair online play for everyone.

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Totally understand, I expected as much

That is good to here, thank you for answering my questions, keep up the good work :slight_smile: