Punishing non-cooperative behaviours?

[Futeko]

This is a grey area for me and I'm encountering the situation quite often those days: when a player performs acts that are not griefing per se, but are against the cooperative nature of the game, is it something that should be punished, or is it simply a way of playing the game?

Example 1: the room the survivors are in is getting swarmed by zombies. Bob runs out of the room, closes the door and barricades it, without waiting for his teammates.

Example 2: the room is swarming with zombies. Survivors are fending them off while waiting for the elevator to come down. Bob sees the elevator arriving, rushes for it and immediately takes it, leaving the others behind.

Example 3: Bob is making sure to pop every barrel he sees - wouldn't want a zombie getting hurt in an explosion, would we?

I'd say, there are two categories of non-cooperative behaviours: first one is "selfish behaviour" - you try to save your life at the expense of everyone else if so it should come to that. Second one is "We can't have nice things" - you break everything and anything that could be useful, from barrels to crates to barricades.

In my opinion, the second one should be punished; that's borderline griefing.
The first one is more fuzzy - sometimes you make honest mistakes (you did not see that you were followed when you closed the door); sometimes it's blatant (dash for the elevator to take it alone). I'd punish such behaviour only when it's obvious you left people behind intentionally.

What do you think?

[Milkman007]

In regards to selfish behavior, if it obliviously is taking away from other(s) enjoyment of the game in a scumbag way that can be avoided, I feel that after a few warnings if the scum actions continue then it should be penalized. However, I feel that there shouldn't be too many cases where the player has to be punished (or can be) because of non-cooperative "selfish" behaviors IMO.

Just my opinion on the matter.

[Futeko]

The issue mostly arises in maps split in parts where if you move forward, everyone that is left behind dies (e.g. crocodile, compound). Some people just dashes for the door and closes it, killing everyone that was too slow or couldn't reach the door in time (e.g. blocked by barricades/zombies). This is where it truly affects the other players; otherwise it's mostly being a general douchebag and an annoyance more than anything.

[Pyro]

I feel like if we enforce this, we'll end up being too strict, in my opinion.
Yes, it's a CO-OP game, but if we start punishing for every little thing, I don't think it will be fun anymore, it may sound weird, but if we do this, people will be too scared to play on our server because they're afraid they're going to be punished because they may not destroy a barricade or they think they'll be banned for closing the airlock too quickly.

See, when I was a ZM admin back in the day, everything was just fine and dandy, nobody complained, because we didn't end up punishing every little thing.

I say we don't do this, because this will seriously impact players' opinions about our server.

[Futeko]

That's my concern actually, because as you said, we can't go and punish every little thing; I'm much more lenient that strict, and if I have to act, it'll always be in tiny baby steps - because I believe people should learn to behave differently because they understand it's not ok rather than because they know they'll be punished otherwise.

The grey area here is that if we start penalizing players who work against others, it might be seen as too strict and subjective and kill the players' motivation. But on the other hand, when there's someone that consistently get others killed every other round because of his selfishness, it's also very annoying for the affected people. Waiting for the next round in ZM is already long enough, but if you get killed not because of the ZM, not because you messed up, but because a teammate decided he's better off without you, it just adds insult to injury.

That's what made me think about a way to discourage this type of behaviour, because it's toxic for the fun of the game. But the line is hard to draw, because it's such a fuzzy, subjective area. It's hard to determine whether there was intent of malice or if they just did not realize what they were doing. Moreover, it's hard to determine whether it was a case of "if I don't do this, I'll die, so I'll have to sacrifice the others" or "Meh, I don't care, they should have been faster".

In fact, it'd actually be better if we could reward cooperative play rather than penalize uncooperative play, but we don't really have the tools for that. Cooperative play is actually its own reward because it makes for a much better game experience, but not everyone sees that.

For instance, I have much more fun playing with a team that tries its best to play as a team rather than a herd of every-man-for-himself-ers - there's nothing more engaging than people doing their best to tear down the wall of zombies between you and the airlock so that you can get through. It's so much better when people actively wait for everyone to be inside an elevator before they push the button.

Until now, the only actions I'd take would be to always repeat the "good practice" teamplay rules, e.g. wait until everyone is in before pushing the button in an elevator, and I'd try to discourage repeat offenders by giving small slaps (e.g. 10 dmg) when it's obvious they just want to troll. I'm trying to rationalize the process, but it's far from being a simple matter.

[Pyro]

-snip-

I completely understand that it could be annoying and selfish, but we have another problem, ~70 percent of the players do this. They might do it because of trolling or to be an asshat, or people do it because they don't really know the way of the game, let alone be a good cooperative player. Players that don't have a conversational level of English might see it as abuse, or they just don't understand and go on and do the same thing over and over till they get, let's just say, banned or kicked.

And you know ZM, when you punish someone for this, there's always someone who does the same thing next round.

It's a good idea to reward cooperative play, but I really have no idea how to implement that in the server.

I guess we need Inject's opinion about this matter because in the end it's up to him to set rules.

[Futeko]

I wouldn't go as far as to say the majority of players do that - actually, "true selfish behaviour" I only encounter in maybe 10-15% of the players. But of course it depends on the people - some days the whole server plays together and everything is great, some days people would shoot eachother for ammo if they could. When I give those examples, I mostly have one person in mind, who is sometimes borderline griefing (blocking people so that they stay stuck in traps, playing with explosives to hurt people, etc.). It's just hard to determine what to do in those cases :<

[Milkman007]

That's mainly why I said the amount of times needed for punishment would be minuscule or uneeded.