The dangers of multiplayer voice in MSFS is clear, it will be used for harassment, abuse and stalking**. You can’t just mute or block bad people. Bad people will create new accounts or find other social media accounts to go harass and abuse** the user. UK government has labelled violence against women and girls as a national threat****, it’s critical for games to put in protection against harassment, abuse and stalking** That means full recorded moderation or no chat. MSFS should have no chat multiplayer.
MSFS is a 3+ rated game. An Xbox Profile doesn’t reveal name, age or etc to non friends. But with chat, a person can ask a child questions which may reveal their location, name, age, school, social media accounts, etc. Asking children to chat with strangers*** will be dangerous.
Xbox live launched in 2002 and Microsoft learned the problems of unrestricted chat. The dangers will close down any real discussion of the Wishlist item by Microsoft.
For those asking for this, please go play a multiplayer online game like Call of Duty, leave open game chat, then come back here and report your findings. I guarantee you will change your mind on this
The only way that I can think this will work is if you can choose which online player you want to communicate with. So if you see someone near you, you click a button that hovers over their plane that says “Direct communication”. Then you at least give the user the ability to opt in to talk to a specific simmer rather than have it be completely open.
Outside of this, it will just open up the “chat” to a bunch of idiots that will spew offensive and harassing comments, which we definitely do not need in the flight sim community. There’s already YouTube videos of people being trolls in FSX online communities and posting those videos, so that’s another issue that I personally would like to avoid (even though I do love a good trolling video).
A reminder that discourse on sexual content, politics, and harassment should not take place in the Official MSFS Forums. If you wish to discuss the disadvantages of a chat feature as it relates to the above, please use a different avenue, or keep your discussions within the Code of Conduct when posting here.
You just listed about a half dozen reasons why they shouldn’t do it. I’m happy to use Discord for an organised group flight, and for other things there is Vatsim, BeyondATC, SayIntentions, and so on.
Many existing solutions. For reasons stated above, chatting with anyone with a mic is not a high priority for me, as the bar for access is so low, no good can come from it.
Text chat could be an interesting half way house. Easy to block certain words, you already have a chat log, so only including a reporting mechanism to have repeat offenders banned would be relatively easy.
Coming from much, much more unregulated games and communities, you gentlemen are making a mountain out of a molehill. How can you actually harm anybody with a fully opt in frequency that is not required for anything?
Right now there’s no reason to tune into 123.450.and everyone in the sim is completely walled off from you. If they enable voice chat, without tuning in to 123.450 it will be exactly as it is now, completely walled off.
As nice as it would be to be able to opt in to communicate with others, it’s still a bad idea and people would still be able to be harmed even with opt-in.
Essentially all the other platforms are opt-in - you have to use an app or go to a website - and people get harmed all kinds of ways. Children fly FS and they would hear how to talk and do it. We have all kinds in the sim skies and no doubt in my mind we’d see everything from helpful assistance to name calling to even threats.
The real world has FCC licenses and a big hammer for those who abuse a radio license. Fines can be huge and compounded per infraction. They are federal offenses in the US. It goes a long way to keep mostly adults in line.
Opening up comms to an E for Everyone age group with no real penalties for bad behavior other than forcing MS to ban users or similar is a recipe for trouble.
The community could always experience the problems for itself by setting up and publicizing a TeamSpeak or Discord or some other voice server. It would be opt-in and anyone interested could join in the fun without MS having to implement and then police and enforce behaviors. You could use channels to mimic localized radio traffic. Manual but it could segregate traffic by city, country, or continent.
Hopefully bad behaviors wouldn’t derail a community server but you never know. Operators of web things involved in abuse or harassment can also get dragged into court cases so something to be eyes open about.
Even with limited access group comms servers there can be issues. Some members are abusive, others won’t shut up long enough for others to get their comms in, others interrupt when others are doing critical comms, and some just have stuck mics or are voice activated and are talking or yelling at spouses, kids, or talking on the phone. You’ll get all of that.
Unfortunately a fair segment of the population can’t be expected to follow guidelines or even rules. Giving them a platform where they can potentially talk to everyone about anything is inviting the chaos that would follow as some take on the role of police and others become antagonists.
Human nature being what it is, I think this proposal is DOA. MS would be wise to not do anything like that except maybe a drop down box to select things to say from a list and do it all as canned text messages with a rate limit on them.
Interestingly enough, Discord was (ab)used for everything all the way up to disseminating classified information and somehow liability did not kill them
Yet. Those wheels turn slow. But it’s a safe bet they’ve had to do all sorts of housekeeping, cleaning, and answer lots of subpoenas for information in the mean time and that includes lawyers and tech folks they might have rather not been paying. I’d bet there have been lots of extra costs associated with that. Plus, other social media companies hire IT folks with clearances to be able to handle classified information requests under various laws. That’s not particularly cheap either.
It’s the costs of dealing with bad actors. The liability starts coming in when things are ignored or handled poorly and being complicit or whatever other exposure starts building in. Do things right and exposure is limited but costs are universal. Something that a big pool of users uses, like any other social media, is expensive to properly administer and a liability if that responsibility is shirked.
Multiplayer chat ? 100% NO! Can you imagine the abuse you’d get for letting someone know they’ve landed in the wrong direction or have spawned on the runway , blocking it for others? No thanks!
