Friday the 13th: The Game has barely been out on the market for any time at all, but the amount of setbacks, bugs, and frustrations that have accumulated in such a short time would be impressive if it wasn’t impacting the community. The game’s developers, Gun Media, recently revealed a list of bannable offenses, and some players are already being hit with questionable permanent bans.
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Without an official report system, F13th works on a per-email basis where users send in proof of violations to the game’s creators that they’ll then review and pass judgment on. Glitch-abusers, racist/homophobic remarks, and other usual suspects made the list, but team killing wasn’t one of the bannable offenses.
While reports of supposedly unwarranted bans have occurred recently, one that blew up online was an account from a user who was banned for sexually harassing users, according to ThePraetorian, one of the developers of the game.
According to the player’s review which can be seen here, he was taunting other players in his game, two Counselors and the Jason player, who were working together to team kill and assist Jason. He admits that he did use offensive language to harass his teammates-turned-enemies, but is convinced that he was banned because one of the other players he was arguing with said they knew the developers.
ThePraetorian confirmed in a later discussion on Reddit that he did, in fact, know the users who issued the report, but he said that they were only “industry colleagues” and the other party would not be banned as well, even though “Deliberately Helping Jason” is squarely No. 4 on the list of bannable offenses.
You might have to dig through the comments to find where ThePraetorian responses since every one of his comments are being blasted with downvotes straight to the bottom of the comment chains. Conversations on Reddit may not seem too important for the game, but pretty much all of the news updates from developers run through Reddit. They even posted their updated guidelines on Reddit and linked to it on Twitter for everyone to see.
Since the fiasco, two members of Gun Media have been removed from their moderator positions within the subreddit. The decision to put them in a power position in a fan-run discussion area was questionable one to begin with, and several other moderators have chosen to step down in light of recent events.
Some players are upset with the way the situation has been handled, but still plenty seem content to simply play the game without any banning and reporting drama involved.
The game began with a strong start despite the flaws and topped PlayStation charts for June, and the game’s devs say that they’re working on a more official report system at this time while the current email report method is more of a temporary fix. A finished report system would likely be beneficial sooner rather than later though to avoid more situations such as the recent banning fiasco.
