Give Admins Ability to Disable Chat
Hello, my name is Anderson. I've been apart of a regiment and have attended events from Native to NW and NaS for several years. Giving admins the ability to disable chat has been a recommended and strongly supported feature that can and should be implemented in all servers when different cultures, people, and arguments/conflicts and world views collide. This goes for communities with a large amount of people who disrupt large scale events by presenting an argument that is biased and creates tension with the community. Things like these should be kept to ourselves on teamspeaks, discords, skype/steam chats, etc. and presents a bad image of the community by only several small groups. This also creates a tendency for people to 'game throw' as it’s called as well, giving away tactics to the other team or trying reverse psychology on them to do the opposite. The game and events at hand should be focused on your perspective. One step the developers have already gone onto with this is with ghosting and giving admins the ability to have free look, to player, or to players’ camera in spectator; I ask, why can’t this be the same?
The counter argument to this will be not allowing players to give free speech or to communicate with their team or that you can already mute players in chat on your screen. However, no matter what, you have to keep in mind that these admins are most likely people who care and pay for the server and their community. Their dominion over their server should be of the upmost priority rather than public players or even members of a community who aren’t admins to give an opinion about different world events and views that should be kept elsewhere. Communication does come into point, but admins should be able to regulate between disabling team chat or global chat or both depending on the situation such as free play or events, and to those who don’t, the people will go elsewhere and find people who do. Finally muting players in your own chat doesn’t necessarily solve the problem for the community, more so for yourself to avoid chat that may ensue. I couldn’t see an entire community using the mute all players in their own chat as some people want reactions.
Since admins cannot force people to do things, nor can the micromanage every person in a 1000+ community, developers need to update the multiplayer to allow the admins to disable chat at the time and the place on the user interface, menu, or admin panel, only allowing admin and internal admin chat to remain on to relay rules or reasons for something. Tactics and voice chat with regiments or groups in game should be discussed and planned on third party applications like Teamspeak, Discord or Skype, and opinionated discussions should be outside of a certain time frame or event.
Not all communities would have to follow this or use this tool, nor does it have to be forced or maintained by communities that require chat to work, but it should be an option of those who want to keep their community focused on the game at hand. Also, going back to how this solves a community problem and not an individual problem, disabling the chat removes admins to need to view logs for offensive or racist statements (whether or not you believe in that), and helps players focus on the game than what the chat is saying. Spamming is another problem that happens, whether its spam from an individual or the entire sever, it fills up the chat box which breaks it so you can no longer view kills or important messages from team communication temporarily. It’s an annoyance that no one should be have to deal with and it is easily exploitable without an ability to disable chat.
I don’t know if the developers care about those who enjoy and remain with the game, as it seems they are focusing on Mount and Blade II, but getting a tiny team and adding this feature which separately disables the team and all chat would both improve stability and create less conflict that would otherwise drive new players away from the game. A large amount of people I know would support this idea and would publicly state this is the right way to go. Who knows, this might even be considered for Mount and Blade II.
In conclusion, the community in general is very much immature in way it communicates through chats about opinions, and it needs admins to regulate the sort of behavior both at the moment and in their communities with this tool.