[LCN] FB LCN Lounge Chat Concerns

I know, I know, another chat announce. Please bear with me and read it through, and don’t panic, this is just a warning.

With chat being one of the most popular and important features for many of our players, we want to make sure we’re doing it justice. Lounge Chat was released just over 10 weeks ago, and in that time we have seen an incredible increase in chat engagement. It has been really cool to see our players in game and interacting with each other so much. On the flip side it’s not great seeing how far the community pushes each other and the boundaries we set up.

Lounge Chat is not an issue on any of our other servers, or any of our other games. The problems we’re running into are exclusive to Facebook LCN and its players. It’s really hard to see this since players on both side of any given conflict are feeling the same way. They’re hurt, frustrated, and tired of the comments being made towards them.

Mob Wars: La Cosa Nostra has a fiercely passionate community, and we know those rivalries and that passion is part of why Lounge can get pretty rowdy. Our players wanted a place with less restrictions, where they could make dirty jokes, swear out their frustration, and get a bit heated with their rivals (and sometimes their friends!). Feedback from players made it clear that a barely moderated channel where we only step in when things really take a turn or cross the line was wanted. Along with the request for light moderation come a few things players have to do themselves.

We created the mute tool and the opt out function so that players are able to curate their own chat experience, and tailor it to be something each person individually is comfortable with. It’s up to you to decide where your boundaries are, and mute the people who step outside of them. Everyone agrees to mute players that offend, upset, or annoy you upon Lounge entry, and we need to see that happening across the board.

If players continue to write in refusing to mute each other, continuing to harass one another in game, and continuing to make lounge a toxic environment we'll have to look at other options regarding the future of Lounge chat in LCN FB. This isn’t something we want to do, and we know so many of you love it, but if players aren’t taking responsibility for their own game experience then our hands are essentially tied. We’re always happy to investigate comments that genuinely break our rules, but trying to use us as a weapon to get enemies banned is not the intention or responsibility of our support department.

We’ll be conducting a Lounge discussion for anyone from LCN that wants to put their two cents in on the best way to improve or mediate Lounge chat. Like I said we don’t want to remove it, but we aren't taking any options off the table if we don't see an improvement.

You can check out the discussion thread here: http://forums.kanoapps.com/threads/lcn-lounge-chat-improvements-discussion.32942/