Report Prompting & KDA

tl;dr Specific metrics on how deaths are calculated. Lots of built in protections for supports to keep them from being targetted unfairly. Seems to be working and other metrics are causing issues, working on improving them as we get data. This system helps us use machine learning/data analysis to less rely on reports to catch players who somehow avoid being reported in the future, so a long term positive for SMITE.



Hey guys,



I wanted to go over specifically how the Intentional Feeding metric for our report feature works, and more specifically how it accounts for deaths in this system.



First off some goals. We know people have bad games and we know that sometimes you are trying and things are going badly. That’s why for each of the 3 different reporting metrics (Intentionally Feeding, AFKing, and Negative Behavior) there are multiple things being tracked and multiple things have different weights. Essentially it is tuned that you need to be doing something that triggers multiple issues to get enough ‘points’ to trigger the prompt for report.



Some of these we don’t want to make public since they could be gamed with perfect knowledge of the system, but how Deaths factor into Intentionally Feeding is more difficult to game. You would game it by not dying which seems like not so bad of a thing.



The metric for it is simple. We take a % of the deaths you have contributed to your team and convert that to a point value. If you are 60% of your teams deaths you would be prompted for a report.



We do have built in protections for different situations though. Your K/D/A has a big impact. If your Kills + Assists >= Deaths, we ignore this and you get 0 points, even if you are 100% of your teams deaths. We also ignore this metric if not enough deaths have occured. This is to prevent something like your team winning really hard but you died twice (and your team only had 2 deaths) and you being marked.



When viewing reports of people being marked where they felt like they shouldn’t, nearly all cases were caused by the “other” factors that are being tracked that do not care about KDA. These were simply tuned much too high and were pushing people into the area of being prompted for reports. In 5.14 these are being adjusted to better reflect what they should be tracking, and it should be much more difficult for people who shouldn’t be prompted to get prompted.



As a whole, Prompting for report does help us quite a bit. Often we find long time abusers who should have been banned can often go unnoticed simply due to people not reporting. It can be for any reason (lack of faith in action being taken, simply not remembering to, being focused on something else) but it happens. Ideally in the future we can do a lot more around machine learning and tracking other metrics to identify players that our report system misses, which is an alternate goal for this system.



In cases where our metrics are clearly identifying players who accumulate high score values (and with the assistance of players in those matches confirming our estimate) we can begin to accumulate data and learn more about player behavior to be less reliant on users needing to report to catch players who are creating a negative environment. Prompting (once we get the numbers tuned right to where players feel like it is prompting when correct) is a very powerful tool for our machine learning to get real world and applicable data.



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