New Overwatch Regulators Oversee Valve's Counter-Strike

Karloff

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New Overwatch Regulators Oversee Valve's Counter-Strike



The system's in beta, so the Overwatch's word isn't law, at least not yet.

Valve's looking for a few good Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/9906-Counter-Strike-Global-Offensive-Review] players to join its Overwatch brigade. These investigators will have the task of looking into alleged instances of cheating and griefing, and handing down a verdict, perhaps even a temporary ban. At the moment the system's in beta, so the Overwatch don't have the final say just yet; but eventually, says Valve, the training wheels will come off and "the system will become community-driven."

These noble enforcers of the law [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_%28Half-Life%29] will, when a case is opened, be given a replay of a randomly selected eight round segment from an accused player's match. Their job will be to determine whether or not an offense was committed within that segment. If all the investigators involved in a case agree on a verdict, a decision is made as to the miscreant's fate, but otherwise the case is tagged "insufficient evidence" and thrown out.

Investigators are chosen based on account activity, and keep the job by consistently and accurately judging cases, but judging by the Steam forums [http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3126804] there's a little confusion as to how that works in practice. There's still some reliability and accuracy tweaks to come; no doubt making the selection process a little clearer will be among the tweaks.

Source: Valve [http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/overwatch/]


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CpT_x_Killsteal

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So this is like League of Legend's community run punishment system with video? Not bad. Would be awesome to see how it works out in the end. I'm curious though. Will the judges be watching at the same time and have the ability to communicate?
 

Yelchor

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If you truly wish to test a man's character, give him power.

An interesting experiment. Even if this system won't work flawlessly, it could work as a lesson for creating better functioning systems in the future.
 

Zombie_Moogle

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Are these decisions made by a panel of Overwatchers or do each of them have Judge Dredd-like ban hammer power?

I could imagine an individual losing a match, taking it personally, & issuing bans out of spite
 

fix-the-spade

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Zombie_Moogle said:
Are these decisions made by a panel of Overwatchers or do each of them have Judge Dredd-like ban hammer power?

I could imagine an individual losing a match, taking it personally, & issuing bans out of spite
It'll take the agreement of several users to recommend a ban, also, the judges don't get to pick which cases they are given to review, so the odds of a butthurt player (or even butthurt player's friends) getting their own opponent to review are very slim. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to do anything with that unless other judges agreed with them.

If it works anything like LoL's tribunal system, to get an actual ban will take ban recommendations from several 'trusted' users and the intervention of customer services.

On League of Legends it works very well, obviously it's not perfect but it is hard to abuse, think of it like cloud-admining. It's certainly better than DotA 2's semi-automated system that really does let butthurt players kick you into LPQ oblivion just for beating them.

It's worth noting that CS:GO has server side admin options too, so admins on individual servers can still ban anyone at any moment for any reason, so there's another incentive to behave yourselves...
 

Vivi22

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Zombie_Moogle said:
Are these decisions made by a panel of Overwatchers or do each of them have Judge Dredd-like ban hammer power?

I could imagine an individual losing a match, taking it personally, & issuing bans out of spite
Every question you asked was answered in the article.
 

Abomination

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As long as there is no way of investigators knowing who other investigators are I can see this being very effective.
 

RicoADF

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Mimsofthedawg said:
This sounds stupid. If I got investigated everytime someone accused me of cheating on Battlefield or COD I'd probably be permabanned simply for constantly wasting the "investigators" time.
Not really, as most people would be investigated the same way. Seriously this would require alot of dedication to have time to do and is going to be flawed no matter what.
 

Steve the Pocket

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Heh heh. "Overwatch." Well played, Valve. I was just thinking the other day that Valve should adopt Combine terminology like "anti-civil behavior" and "anticitizen" for their moderation system. Looks like they're one step ahead of me.