MrShine's reasons why this is not going to be an effective solution to troll prevention:
- Trolls don't care about kicks; just hop in next round.
- Trolls now have new effective tools for griefing
- Run into swings; report the teammate for wounding
- Pissed that someone "stole" a kill in a round and you took a small amount of accidental team damage? Report the teammate out of spite
- Want to annoy the server? Spam punches with a buddy in spawn and everyone gets to see your continuous report messages.
All the while we now have a bunch of new gray area for admins to deal with:
- There is no way to distinguish "real" reports from "fake" reports, especially how glances and no-damage punches/kicks are reportable
- Playerbase will very quickly become desensitized to the constant fake reports, and real intentional attacks will STILL require 'i' chat to actually make admins pay attention
- At what point do reporters now need to be monitored? Will admins actually need to step in and punish players who are misusing the report function? How do you define that or make a case for this?
-Oh yeah horse bumps/ attacking horses currently doesn't trigger the message, so it may become easier for griefers to hide their actions.
In conclusion, nothing is fixed. Admins still won't have firm ground to punish people based on the messages, 'i' chat will still be required to actually lock in on true trolls, it's just that admins and the rest of the community will need to sort through a bunch of shit from people who misuse the function.
My solutions/recommendations:
-It's ok to keep it, but hide the actual reporting from the entire server, and instead make it optional for admins to turn on so THEY can view the reports, but leave it INVISIBLE for everyone else, including the person who is reported for the team wounding
-REMOVE the 'M' option from non-damaging attacks so people can't be reported for friendly kicks/punches that do no damage
-Remove the 'auto-kick' function at 5/5 reports. Instead just leave it as something admins can be aware of.
Implementing my solutions will make this far less obnoxious to players in general, while serving as a possible indicator for admins. If the report isn't shown to the entire server it won't be as "funny" for people to report for jokes (people may still spite report people for accidental ones but admins should quickly be able to determine what those are).