Imagine a game banning you for being toxic and then steam banning you from all multiplayer games. Boggles the mind.
If Valve had the staff and Valve was the one handling bans from games, that’s exactly how it should work.
People who aren’t consistently making the experience of everyone around them worse don’t routinely get banned, and a proper appeals system is more than enough. Being online doesn’t mean that there aren’t real people on the other end that you’re harassing and treating like shit and ruining their gaming experience. “If you make an alt and go online, you lose offline access too” wouldn’t be an overreach. It would just be good policy. You don’t have a right to harass people with impunity.
You can get banned from forums or the game itself by the gamedevs and you can get banned for breaking no rules I don’t see any advantage to such a system. People would literally get baited into arguments in games and end up getting banned because they argued with someones throwaway account or banned by a non involved third party just because they through the argument was toxic even if it wasn’t and wasn’t even directed at them. This is infinitely worse than community servers now you have another layer of useless abstraction with dubious quality removing access to all your games. If only people who harass people with impunity didn’t already get banned in games and were the only people banned in games.
You’re conflating two things. This isn’t developers. It’s Microsoft.
If Valve was in charge of bans, a literal lifetime ban for you as a human being would be entirely justifiable and fair as a punishment for inappropriate conduct in interactions with other players.
If Valve had the staff and Valve was the one handling bans from games, that’s exactly how it should work.
People who aren’t consistently making the experience of everyone around them worse don’t routinely get banned, and a proper appeals system is more than enough. Being online doesn’t mean that there aren’t real people on the other end that you’re harassing and treating like shit and ruining their gaming experience. “If you make an alt and go online, you lose offline access too” wouldn’t be an overreach. It would just be good policy. You don’t have a right to harass people with impunity.
You can get banned from forums or the game itself by the gamedevs and you can get banned for breaking no rules I don’t see any advantage to such a system. People would literally get baited into arguments in games and end up getting banned because they argued with someones throwaway account or banned by a non involved third party just because they through the argument was toxic even if it wasn’t and wasn’t even directed at them. This is infinitely worse than community servers now you have another layer of useless abstraction with dubious quality removing access to all your games. If only people who harass people with impunity didn’t already get banned in games and were the only people banned in games.
You’re conflating two things. This isn’t developers. It’s Microsoft.
If Valve was in charge of bans, a literal lifetime ban for you as a human being would be entirely justifiable and fair as a punishment for inappropriate conduct in interactions with other players.