Fellowship's dev knows you're sick of toxic players, but it refuses to "whack on a leavers penalty" and call it a day

As someone who grew up playing online multiplayer games, I'm no stranger to toxicity. From League of Legends to Overwatch 2, I've been told get back in the kitchen many a time, and while it doesn't really get to me anymore, I can see why those who are new to videogames play three rounds then uninstall the game. Whether you're immune to bad actors or not, they're straight up annoying, and will always find a way to ruin what should be a fun experience. As an amalgamation of MMOs like World of Warcraft and MOBAs like Dota 2, Fellowship has suffered the same fate as the videogames that have come before it, but while the team has some ideas about how to combat toxicity, it wants to be careful.

While Fellowship didn't have the easiest of launches, Chief Rebel's 'MODA' (multiplayer online dungeon adventure) has recovered from its initial sever issues and continues to thrive on Steam. While it's experienced the usual post-launch slump, it's holding steady at around 9k to 11k peak players per day - not too shabby.

A lot of the negative reviews, however, revolve around player interaction. One, for example, says that the game is "great," but laments the lack of "punishment for leavers [in] groups." Another response echoes this, but also notes that there's no sanction for leaving queues, meaning that, given DPS is always the most popular role, you'll be waiting for ten to 15 minutes for a match. To make that worse, your healer or tank may casually decide they're not feeling this particular map and leave, and so the vicious cycle repeats.

In a recent interview with community director Hamish Bode, I ask how the team plans to approach punishment systems in future updates. He tells me that there are several "key features" that are currently "top priority," including the much-requested Eternal matchmaking system, and various new communication systems that feed into quelling toxicity.

"Right now people can only whisper [to] each other if they're in the same Stronghold instance and that sort of thing. That's a fix that absolutely needs to happen," he says. "But if we can tick that box, there are some community social tools that we want to start adding in.

"We're seeing a lot of the pain points and a lot of the friction. We have these two communities rubbing up against each other: we have people who absolutely know this game, they don't even need to look at it, they know what they're doing. Then we have people who have never played a game like this before and are kind of being thrown into this meat grinder. Because we don't necessarily have the best in-game communication stuff right now because it's not built yet, a lot of those pain points are just happening naturally.

"Our overarching goal for the forseeable future is to make sure that we have enough of those communication and social tools so that people can just find their people, because that's the big problem. The problem isn't when people get into a group with people who are like-minded and have the same goal - when that happens, and we do see it happening, people are having an incredible time. We just need to get them there."

While improving communication will certainly help, some players will continue to misbehave. I ask Bode if active punishment systems are on the cards alongside the communication improvements, and he admits that the issue is "complicated."

"If people have ways to play with their people, [toxicity] will happen less," he muses. "That kind of circumvents the whole problem. But we want to take a very considered approach to [punishment]. We could whack on a leavers penalty right now, but we also need to think about player behavior. If we just do that without considering it, people won't leave, they'll just grief the dungeon and be like 'well, I'm not going to leave if I'm going to get a penalty, I'm just going to go make a cup of tea and then you can all leave.' It's quite complex.

"In Dota [2] if you get reported a lot, you'll lose certain privileges, like pinging and voice chat," he continues. "Or you might get put into the low priority queue, which is horrible and you're like 'I'll never be a bad person again.' Those are the kind of things I'm intrigued by, but it can take a while to build the thing that makes sense for your game. We couldn't necessarily copy and paste that from someone else, and even if we did want to go in that direction, it would take a while to implement those things."

"We need to tweak a few knobs to make it work, and when we do add in a lot of these bits and pieces, we want to make sure we're not just punishing people who are bad actors, but [that we're also] encouraging people to be positive and incentivizing people to stick around. So one of the ideas we have is you're in solo queue, you match with a group, you complete a dungeon because that's a nice thing to do, and then you stay in that group and you play another one. The next one you finish, you get 20% more gold, more resources, that sort of thing, so that people are incentivized to stick together. Can we refine those systems so we can encourage people to forge stronger groups?"

Bode notes that he "solo queues exclusively to understand what's going on. Even after I've been having a great run, we'll complete the dungeon, no problems, easy, [then] people will leave the group straight after and I'll be like 'what, we just had a good time!'

"But there's a cycle that I think people are in. We need to kind of tweak that user experience, and it will be through small steps. Some of those steps might be leavers penalties, but not blindly doing it without figuring out how we can create a suite of tools that make sense. We're starting out on this interesting journey of managing player toxicity, which takes a long time."

It's not a task I'm envious of, I must admit. We've seen hundreds of penalty systems over the years, from Riot's account-wide punishments that even affect participation in its new TCG, Riftbound, to Valve's OG VAC bans for the most heinous of cheaters. None of them have been bulletproof, but I appreciate Chief Rebel's more balanced approach - reward the good, punish the guilty.

If you haven't tried Fellowship yet, you can get it for 20% off ($19.99 / £16.79) on Steam until Thursday December 4. Just click here. You won't regret it.