Killing Floor 2 dev says it will block abusive players

Developer Tripwire has included a clause in the end user license agreement for Steam title Killing Floor 2 that gives it the right to ban players who are abusive.

We also will not tolerate anyone using the game, or any servers or forums provided for the game, to be continually or repeatedly abusive to other players,” the clause reads. This includes, but is not limited to, ‘griefing,’ racist bigotry, sexism or any other forms of ‘cyber bullying.’ We will also not tolerate anyone hosting servers for the game where such behaviours are continually or repeatedly allowed to take place.

If we find you are a Cheater or Abusive, we will revoke your CD key and ban you from the KF2 servers and tell your mum! Your license will automatically terminate, without notice, and you will have no right to play KF2 or any KF2 Mods against other players or make any other use of KF2. End of story.”

Which all sounds fair enough, right? Well apparently not.

A number of Steam users have taken to the game’s discussion pages to question the policy and insist that they won’t buy the game until the EULA is altered.

Threads on the subject have titles such as un-acceptable EULA”, I was interested in this game until I saw the EULA” and You guys fixed your EULA yet?”. The most common complaint seems to be the concern that people who have paid for the game could have their access revoked without warning, or that the system could be abused by dobbing in fair and friendly players to try and evoke a ban.

Tripwire president Alan Wilson even opened a thread himself to discuss the issue.

People are worried that we can ‘take your game away’. Well, yes, we can. We’ve sold around 10m games over the last 10 years. We have, I believe, taken away games from about two people. One of those was later convicted as a hacker in court.

[Note that the very first reply to the thread reads, quite amazingly, as follows: so the other guy that you took his game away from, what did he do to deserve it?”. Another, which we just have to mention, says: If this is what you call a ‘Civilized Society’ then give me death, This is just pure insanity! I am not going to drink your freaking SJW koolaid.]

We added the pieces to the EULA about ‘behaviours’ as a reaction to really evil behaviours which are simply not appropriate in multi-player or co-op games. Or anywhere in civilized society, for that matter. So what does this mean? It just means that we wanted to make it clear where we stand. We don’t have any intention (or the time, frankly) to start policing servers and hunting down people who use bad language at each other.

It’s there so that, if at some point in the future, some individual gets utterly out of control and is being abusive to enough thousands of people to come to our attention – we can actually take action. For the other 99.999 per cent of the population – play on! We’re not watching or tracking you or anything else. We have wayyyy better things to do – like making games.”