devtrackers.gg
Reporting players for toxic actions absolutely works. Several Hundred players are banned each week through reporting. Could we still do more with this system? probably, and we are constantly working on the behind the scenes portions of it.
It isnt really practical or wise to do 100% of your player behavior moderation through reporting, as it can be unreliable (lots of players do not report) and it could be abusable if it was too easy to clog up the system through frivolous reports. It also can be a bad idea to overly explain in detail how the system works, as it can help toxic players to work around it. But we do rely on reporting for a solid chunk of our moderation, and every single report helps.
We added a feature back in Season 5 that was a big improvement to the reporting system. Now, when you report a player, we have a system that tracks message spam, non-combat time, afk time, KDA, VGS spam, and etc that multiplies the report. So if you report someone and they have been saying toxic words, and have done very little fighting - that one report will actually be worth 20x or more - making sure that person skyrockets up in the system so we can review and ban them.
Please:
If you see something especially offensive
We certainly do care about this and are constantly taking steps toward reducing toxicity in SMITE. However, its an extremely difficult problem to solve, as is clearly seen across all sorts of multiplayer games.
Recently we increased all penalties and greatly increased the "bannable" offenses list. Here's my best attempt at a recap, although disclaimer this is not directly my department, though I often work closely with them.
Punishment Actions
the minimum ban we now hand out is 7 days - there is no such thing as a warning, or a 2-3 day ban anymore. If you get an in-game notification or a reply from our support team - this is the minimum punishment a player received. I still see a lot of confusion around this, hope this clears it up.
We decreased the number of bans before you get perma-banned. There used to be many steps (roughly 5 bans to reach perma). Now its: 7 day - 14 day - Perma - thats it, and there are many ways you can jump right to perma (hacking, hate speech)
Playing on an alt account while banned is not allowed. Lots of bad actors in the SMITE community feel immune because they have an insane number of accounts. If we ban your account, even for 7 days, if the same player is caught playing on other accounts, those accounts will also be banned, often quickly escalating them to perma bans when more bad chatlogs are found on those accounts.
It should be noted that "Deserter" bans are a completely different system and do not factor into any of what I am describing here today.
Offenses
we take all hate speech and threats of violence very seriously. Players who attempt to get around our in-game hate speech filters - will be insta-perma'd - so if you see someone typing a slur with spaces or slashes between letters - please report them, they will be banned.
general insults, feeding, not playing the game, stealing roles, etc are all reportable and bannable if the player displays a pattern of this behavior. No one is banned for 7 days for doing something smaller like this one time, but if we see a lot of reports or if a support rep sees many games with similar behavior, the 7-14-Perma system will be used on them.
I wish you could all see how much we really do care. And I know people sometimes feel like they just hear about how we are trying, but they dont actually see results - this doesnt feel like one of those times to me. We have changed policies, we are banning more people, we are banning them longer, and all of this has seen change recently, with more on the way. We still have a long way to go, but we are making progress.