Hi everyone! We’re in the process of overhauling how we help you to manage your player experience in Blood on the Clocktower online, and I thought it’d be helpful for me to let you know - on behalf of TPI and the mod team - how we’re empowering you to protect yourselves.
We want to stay as hands-off as we reasonably can be, while staying vigilant and protecting our Terms of Use, which apply to all games played in the BOTC app, public and private: our first line of moderation is you, the community.
We know that most of you use the app to play games with your friends and in curated communities with regular Storytellers and organisers. We think the best way to approach Clocktower is as a party game with a group of friends that you know and get on with, so we want to keep encouraging this way of organising games!
We also know that a lot of you play in our open lobbies, or in larger communities with maybe less oversight, and we want to accommodate you too, so we’ve always had an option for Storytellers to remove people from their lobbies. Now, we’re introducing a new way for everyone to better control who they play with by using our new and highly requested blocking and flagging feature!
As you can see in the screenshots below, if you navigate to the ‘game session’ screen and click on a player, you now have the option to block or unblock that user.
If you choose to block someone in the Blood on the Clocktower app, the following will happen:
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You’ll still be able to hear them (unless you choose to mute them);
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Their camera feed, avatar, and nameplate will be hidden from you;
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Text messages will be hidden (but you can unhide them by clicking on them);
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Lobbies with a blocked user will be highlighted from the lobby screen; and
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You’ll receive a warning if you try to join a lobby with a user you’ve blocked in it, and if a user you’ve blocked joins a lobby you’re already in.
These changes are coming as part of a larger and ongoing overhaul of social and safety systems in the app. We recently updated our Terms of Use with Fair Play guidelines and published an expanded version of our moderation policy, which you can read here. Soon, you can also expect a way to confidentially report issues directly to the Storyteller that no one else in the session, including spectators, can see.
We have other social features planned for the slightly more distant future, including a friends list and an easier way to contact moderators in case these measures aren’t enough. It’d be great to get feedback on how this works! Right now if you run into any issues that you can’t handle yourself you can reach out to us at support@botc.app, or Patrons can make tickets on the official Discord server.
