Feature Highlight: Account Bans
Welcome to the first installment of the Pragma tech blog Feature Highlight series. As we continue to add new and enhanced features to the Pragma backend game engine, we’ll share highlights right here. Of course, you can always visit our docs page for full Pragma documentation and release notes.
In release 0.0.101 we focused on user management with our enhanced account ban feature that empowers operators to efficiently maintain a safe and fair environment with tools that are both powerful and completely customizable. Pragma’s mission is to support healthy and vibrant online communities, so we’re especially excited that this release allows operators to better manage player activities and uphold community standards.
Bad actors in video game communities have an impact on Player Retention and Life Time Value (LTV). A study on League of Legends suggests that players who face bad behavior like abusive language or harassment on their first session, are 320% more likely to churn immediately and never return. Clearly, this is an issue important to players and studios too.
Banning players allows you to moderate who plays your game and how you shape the expected behavior of your player base. The tools we provide here allow you to set temporary bans of varying timescales so you can warn a player that a certain kind of behavior is unacceptable and may lead to a permanent ban if they continue to violate the rules.
You can also create custom reasons for bans, this again allows you to effectively communicate to both your players and your moderation / support team why the player was banned. With the added layer of being able to view a player's ban history, your moderation / support team can see the whole picture of a player’s past behavior and further utilize that information to determine whether a permanent ban is in order.
For a detailed view of these new features, the full demo provides a comprehensive guide to what’s now possible with Pragma’s enhanced capabilities, you can watch that below.
We have added the new 'Bans' tab in the social operator portal to manage player accounts. Operators can apply bans to individual games or across all games, with options for both temporary and permanent restrictions. For example, a one-hour temporary ban can be applied for minor offenses or you can set a custom time window.
Operators can customize ban reasons by modifying the 'EXT_BAN_REASON' enum in the account RPC ext proto file. This flexibility allows for adding specific reasons such as cheating, toxic behavior, or fraudulent activities, ensuring each ban fits the violation.
The Operator web portal also supports customization of its interface. Operators can replace standard components with custom Vue.js classes to better meet their needs, demonstrated by swapping the default duration picker and ban reason section with tailored versions.
Looking for more moderation tools? Pragma also works directly with proven partners like GGWP and Modulate.
The GGWP Platform, which focuses on multimodal detections across chat, player reports and gameplay can also automatically trigger sanctions and supports notifications such as report confirmations and warnings across different player channels. And with Modulate’s ToxMod, features like player report correlation, proximity chat support, and multilingual capabilities give moderators full context on code of conduct violations to enforce bans, mutes, or other player enforcement actions. When seamlessly integrated with Pragma, these partners enable studios to immediately respond to each toxic incident so that they can provide a better player experience.
Here is the link to our full release notes: https://pragma.gg/docs/0.0.101/updates-release-notes/0.0.101
