Ci sono molti proprietari incapaci di labrador, vi assicuro, ma non mi sembra che questa razza sia responsabile di alcun incidente. I cani non sono tutti uguali: posso lasciare la nostra Mirta (labrador nero) dentro un asilo infantile, adora i bambini. Voi lo fareste, con un pitbull?
Patentini per i proprietari? Sono un palliativo, non risolvono niente. È necessario un divieto. Pit Bull Terrier, Japanese Tosa, Dogo Argentino, Fila Brasileiro: nel Regno Unito possedere queste razze di cani è vietato dalla legge. Leggo su www.gov.uk: «Se possedete uno di questi cani, potete consegnarlo alla polizia o alle autorità municipali. Se verrete trovati con uno di questi cani in un luogo pubblico, la polizia potrà requisirlo senza un mandato». Si può fare. Cosa aspetta il governo italiano? La prossima tragedia?
Vercelli, ieri: bimbo di 5 mesi muore azzannato dal pitbull di famiglia. Era in braccio alla nonna. Provincia di Foggia, ieri: pitbull azzanna quindicenne e bimba di sette anni, la mamma si lancia dal balcone per proteggerla. Sesto San Giovanni, martedì: bimba di due anni e mezzo azzannata da un pitbull mentre gioca con la sorellina. Trasportata in codice rosso all’ospedale di Niguarda. Milano, 4 maggio: aggressione in casa, bambino di dieci anni morso al torace e una gamba dal pitbull di famiglia. Eboli, 22 aprile due pitbull uccidono un bambino di un anno strappandolo dalle braccia dello zio. Mantova, 14 aprile: un pitbull senza guinzaglio e museruola azzanna un bimbo di sette anni e lo zio mentre erano in attesa dell’autobus. Questo, in poco più di un mese (e certamente non è tutto). Domanda: cosa aspettiamo a intervenire?
https://www.corriere.it/opinioni/24_maggio_18/pitbull-un-divieto-come-in-inghilterra-40ff47bb-b51c-4e07-8167-ee53da54bxlk.shtml

I bought a ticket trough the Trenitalia website from Geneva to Florence for June. The ticket specifies "Autobus ECXXX" for the first leg (Geneva-Milan). I can't find where exactly (address) to take this bus/ if is it a replacement for a train (I understand there is maintenance work disrupting some lines over the summer). I could not find the route on the SBB page when I tried to look for that EC (EuroCity tain I thought). Does this mean I should take an alternate route ? (can I take another train with the same ticket?). Any suggestions on how to figure this out would be appreciated. Thanks! Should I ask for a refund and book something else directly with SBB?

The sentence "a cow eats grass", is "krowa je trawę", but it can also be "trawę je krowa", "krowa trawę je", "trawę krowa je", "je trawę krowa" and "je krowa trawę", right?
This didn't seem to be much of an issue, just a cool quirk of the language (as in all arrangements the sentence is understandable) until my father mentioned the phrase "samochód wyprzedził autobus"...
So, how do we communicate whether the car passed the bus or that the bus passed the car? Do we just have to guess?

Hi there,
My textbook has written "Faccio colazione in fretta, prendo un caffè al banco e poi prendo l’autobus delle otto e un quarto per l’università"
Is it not correct to have "alle otto" instead?
Grazie

Hey everyone!
Can anyone recommend a good bus company to travel from Santa Marta to Bogotá?
Is it safer to get the bus during the day? Or are night buses okay too?
Any tips would be so helpful!
Thank you 🙏
Hola a todos!
¿Alguien puede recomendar una buena empresa de autobús para viajar de Santa Marta a Bogotá?
¿Es más seguro coger el autobús durante el día? ¿O también están bien los autobuses nocturnos?
¡Cualquier consejo sería muy útil!
Gracias 🙏

Due to a personal emergency I have to travel to Paris CDG to take a flight at 10.40 AM. I booked a ticket on SNCG (french rail) from Lux to Lorrain TGV - it is an express minibus/bus (navette/autobus) from CFL.
Has anyone taken it ? is it on time ? It say that it will take about 1 hour 25 mins to arrive at Lorraine TGV and I will have around 13 mins to take the train.
Can you tell me where exactly in the Gare region this bus departs from ?
Thanks a lot for your help.

Abstract: This article provides an analysis of “teaming,” or allying with a competitor, in battle-royale video games. Allying with a competitor is a normal strategy in social-deduction games, but it is often considered to be cheating in battle royale. Persistent complaints about teaming can be seen across a variety of social media platforms. This article surveys the controversy and outlines the major attempts to address such problems, including developer changes to matchmaking systems, automated moderation and opposition to stream sniping. These approaches are substantially successful, and yet there appear to be social and ludic conditions that make teaming an intractable problem. This article appeals to established economic and typological analyses of game goals to rethink the social dilemma of teaming in battle royale. The thesis argues that the major attempts to address the problem of teaming typically assume teaming is necessarily an unskilled strategy that circumvents the game goal of having a sporting contest of skills, but a comprehensive analysis of teaming allows us to recognize that it is conceptually possible to design regulatory mechanisms for teaming such that teaming requires skill. The conclusion begins to chart future research on sporting designs for regulating teaming.

Introduction

“Cross-teaming” or simply “teaming” in competitive multiplayer games is a strategy wherein a competitor temporarily cooperates with another competitor. Teaming is a central feature of social-deduction games centered on cunning negotiations, alliances and betrayals, for example the boardgame Diplomacy (Wizards of the Coast, 1954), the party game Mafia (Davidoff, 1986), the card game Are You a Werewolf? (Looney Labs, 1997) and the video game Among Us (Innersloth, 2018). In battle-royale video games, however, teaming has been a popular form of cheating. Battle-royale games are competitive, multiplayer survival games in which the last competitor alive wins the game. A match of battle royale typically has a large number of competitors in an arena with a variety of weapons. There are various game mechanics to decrease hiding/ camping and increase encounters between competitors, for example shrinking the arena area over time. Teaming in battle royale can provide a major advantage by allowing two competitors to outnumber a third competitor.

The analysis in this article begins with a brief history of battle royale and the crux of the problem with teaming. Teaming is a volatile practice that is randomized by the whims of other competitors, so teaming appears to provide an advantage based on luck within an otherwise sporting contest of skills. Players of battle royale use social media to complain about teaming, and game designers have addressed this problem in a variety of innovative ways inspired by both popular and academic conversations. However, illicit teaming remains a significant problem for the gaming community. How can we complicate our understanding of this problem and address it in new ways?

There are nuanced theoretical frameworks for unpacking the dynamics of teaming. The analysis in this article introduces and combines existing scholarship on the economics and typology of game goals. Jonas Heide Smith (2007) argues that cheating in online video games gives rise to a social dilemma, and I show how Smith’s economic framework can be extended to illicit teaming. Debus, Zagal and Cardona-Rivera (2020) argue that the goals of video games can be deeply equivocal, and I extend their analysis to consider alternate ways of framing the social dilemma of teaming. I argue that in the case of battle-royale video games, game developers have been largely prohibitive of teaming, but combining Smith with Debus et al. allows us to recognize that there can also be permissive and regulativeapproaches to teaming that substantially address the social dilemma. The major attempts to address the problem of teaming typically assume teaming is necessarily an unskilled strategy that circumvents the game goal of having a sporting contest of skills, but a comprehensive analysis of teaming allows us to recognize that it is conceptually possible to design regulatory mechanisms for teaming such that teaming requires skill. This article concludes by gesturing toward skillful regulatory mechanisms for addressing the social dilemma of teaming, including the innovative mechanism of “assimilation” in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2022).

Battle Royale and Illicit Teaming

Teaming has been a part of battle royale since its inception. According to Teemu Pesonen’s article “The History of Battle Royale Esports” (2023), the Japanese film Battle Royale (Fukasaku, 2000) inspired the video-game genre. The plot of the film includes a government forcing students to fight each other to the death on an island, where only the last student alive may leave the island. The film also clearly includes cunning betrayals and alliances between competitors.

The genre of battle royale was further popularized by the American film The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012). Pesonen tells us that The Hunger Games directly inspired the first battle-royale modification for the video game Minecraft(Mojang Studios, 2011). In 2013 Brendan Greene, also known as “PlayerUnknown,” developed a mod called “DayZ: Battle Royale,” a battle-royale modification for the video game Arma II (Bohemia Interactive, 2012). Greene was inspired by other Arma II mods like Brian Hicks’ and Jordan Taylor’s mod for Arma II, “DayZ: Survivor Gamez” (McCarthy, 2017), and Green introduced to the battle-royale genre “items and weapons that were randomly spread across the map” (Pesonen, 2023). The first battle-royale video game to be officially published was PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Krafton, 2017). The collaborative, online, multiplayer-vs-environment, survival video game Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) added a dedicated mode for battle royale within a year of its release, contributing to the battle-royale genre both in-game building mechanics and cross-platform play.

Other major battle-royale games include Vigor (Bohemia Interactive, 2018), Apex Legends (Respawn Entertainment, 2019) and Call of Duty: Warzone (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2020), but I will foreground Fortnite for illustration. Fortnite debuted right when teaming was exploding in popularity in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but unlike Battlegrounds, Fortnite was initially designed to be a cooperative game, and elements of this cooperative spirit made it into the battle-royale mode, including the ability to communicate with others by dancing with them and expressing emotions. Fortnite’s battle-royale mode also implicitly encourages teaming insofar as it regularly awards prizes like virtual clothing and accessories to competitors who complete non-competitive challenges (for example, Dance on a Giant Cup of Coffee), which often leads to competitors cooperating until they can complete the challenge.

The most common, overt way to initiate teaming in Fortnite is to stop fighting and start dancing. If the dancing is reciprocated, the two competitors have indicated to one another that they want to cooperate temporarily. Other overt ways to initiate teaming include disarming yourself in front of a competitor, dropping healing items, building heart-shaped constructs and rapidly switching between ducking and standing stances. Subtle ways to initiate teaming can include pretending not to see someone, running away instead of attacking and defensively “boxing up” (hiding in your own building) without taking opportunities to attack. In each of these cases the initiation procedures take place during a match. However, teaming can also occur prior to a match when two or more people communicate their intention to first enter a match as competitors and then cooperate by identifying one another via coded behavior, for example meeting at a certain location or using peculiar virtual clothing.

Unlike a sporting contest of skills, teaming in battle royale currently has deeply random elements from beginning to end. The tension between a sporting contest of skills and random game elements goes to the heart of the controversy around teaming. Attempting to initiate teaming is a gamble. Dancing, disarming or deliberately passing up opportunities to attack exposes vulnerabilities. Competitors have short-term incentive to eliminate anyone who is initiating teaming because the initiator’s defenses are down. Not everyone has an equal opportunity to team because reciprocation relies on the whims of others. Even when there is an established collusion, there is still an incentive to be the first to betray the other, which makes the long-term benefits of teaming precarious. If teamers are the last competitors in a match, a competitor may betray the other, eliminate themselves or wait until environmental damage randomly decides who wins. Ultimately, teaming introduces a volatile element of luck into a sporting competition of skill.

Controversies and Proposed Solutions

I searched for and surveyed comments about the teaming controversy on live-streams, blog archives, developer patch notes and game-specific discussion forums, including twitch.com, youtube.com, bohemia.net, hypixel.net and reddit.com. This article only cites about two dozen posts and forums, but I believe these sources on teaming are representative of the thousands of ephemeral commentaries I have seen across a variety of platforms. The arguments both for and against teaming display strong emotion (sleaches, 2020; Seahawks12, 2022; ThatOneRedditBro, 2022; Clix, 2023). In my assessment there is a general trend in the dispute. Across the major battle-royale games, game players have complained about teaming for being an unfair advantage and, usually, against the official rules. Posts that defend teaming may be dismissive of the seriousness of casual teaming, but these defenses can also be passionate appeals to the enjoyability of cunning alliances and betrayals (successXX, 2016; Emble12, 2021; SzzzMK47, 2021). Fans who defend teaming have been insultingly dismissed as unskilled competitors who can only win by cheating. The controversy over teaming has led game designers to propose a number of creative solutions, but the persistence of teaming despite these innovations speaks to the practical intractability of this problem.

Certain solutions to illicit teaming speak to the perceived motivations of teaming. Early in the teaming controversy, developers discerned in teaming a simple desire on the part of solo competitors to compete in teams, and the result has been optional game modes for legitimate team-based battle royale, namely Duos, Trios or Quads. However, illicit teaming continued to be common in Solos as well as team-based modes. Another widespread interpretation of teaming is that it is used by unskilled competitors who simply want a sporting chance against vastly higher-skilled players, and the result has been skill-based matchmaking, wherein competitors are matched equally according to an automated index of their perceived skill. Teaming remained common.

Game designers have attempted to prevent teaming by addressing the tools used for teaming. Competitors who can communicate prior to joining the matchmaking queue may conspire to join the queue at the exact same time, which increases the odds of getting into the same match and allows the competitors to find one another to team. This problem led game designers to implement a randomized matchmaking time-delay so that it does not matter when someone joins the queue (swapode, 2017). Game designers may also use a filter to prevent competitors from entering the same match if they are one another’s “Friends” list. Streamers have proposed anonymizing competitor names and appearances to prevent this kind of teaming (Amos, 2019). These approaches have been effective, but teaming remained a substantial problem.

Matches can also contain automated moderators that help gaming communities police teaming. In the article “Collusion Detection in Team-Based Multiplayer Games” the authors Laura Greige, Fernando De Mesentier Silva, Meredith Trotter, Chris Lawrence, Peter Chin and Dilip Varadarajan explain how automatic moderation works to help catch teamers in tournaments (Greige et al., 2022). Competitors who use teaming to climb the ranks of a tournament show an improbable consistency in their respective match rankings over time. Therefore, automated moderators compare gameplay data over several matches to identify these improbable correlations and flag competitors. The moderator assigns to a pair of competitors a higher index of teaming the more frequently that those two competitors begin a match close to one another, stay close to one another and end a match with similar ranking. The goal of automatic moderation is to select cases for further review by human moderators. A majority (but not all) of the cases flagged by the automated moderator were confirmed by human moderators to be genuine cases of teaming, so the system is largely effective. However, automatic moderation does not necessarily aspire to perfection or even to identify collusion itself. Rather, automatic moderation works by identifying the probability that two competitors are colluding, “Hence, human intervention is still essential and further investigation by human experts is required before taking any enforcement action against the potential colluders flagged by our model” (Greige et al., 2022, p. 13).

Human moderators may observe or review matches in order to remove competitors who act like teamers, that is, competitors who are in proximity, do not attack one another and/ or simultaneously attack a third party. Unfortunately, these are also the behaviors of legitimate competitors who are camping, stealthy, short on resources (if not empty), low on health and/ or ambushing ongoing fights, namely “third-partying.” Complaints about people who ambush ongoing fights consider this tactic to be unsporting, but it would make no sense to demand that such an integral strategy should be banned from battle royale simply due to its affinity with teaming. It is not possible to entirely prevent the appearance of teaming because teaming is an implied product of games where players must be selective about which competitors they move against. When competitors in the end game must be selective about which other two competitors they move against, two competitors can have a legitimate ceasefire and mutual third target without any intention to team. Competitors complain about being removed from matches or even banned due to moderators mistaking their legitimate behavior for teaming (simon-whitehead, 2020). The intention to team can be difficult to discern even for human moderators.

One curious case of persistent, illicit teaming is one-way teaming. This occurs when a competitor helps another competitor without their consent. This typically happens when a fan of a streamer gets into the same match as the streamer, and the fan (while watching the live-stream) does whatever they can to benefit the streamer--leaving resources in their path, healing them from a distance (for example, with health splashes), or intentionally getting eliminated by the streamer (thus awarding the streamer loot and credit for the elimination). Sometimes this is benign, like when fans enter a streamer’s match only to build heart-shaped constructs for them to see, but this form of teaming can cause significant social friction.

In April of 2023, Epic Games banned the Fortnite streamer Cody “Clix” Conrod for two weeks due to illicit teaming (Gan, 2023). This meant that Clix was also effectively banned for the following lucrative Fortnite Championship Series tournaments. The teaming occurred due to the actions of a stream sniper who healed and supplied Clix largely without Clix’s consent (Gan, 2023). Stream sniping refers to a competitor watching another competitor’s live stream to see what their competitor sees. In this case the stream sniper was a malevolent troll with an account named “N1 Clix Hater,” and the troll was likely deliberately trying to get Clix banned (Clix, 2023). However, the penalties would be the same if the one-way teaming was from a benevolent fan. Clix admits some responsibility for teaming because Clix solicited certain helpful behavior from the stream sniper over the live stream, although this solicitation was solely to catch the sniper in the act of stream sniping, that is, to get them banned (Clix, 2023).

One-way teaming had a lasting impact on Clix. Following the end of the two-week ban, Clix streamed his first match, and a competitor began healing him with the same splash items that “N1 Clix Hater” used. For fear of being banned again, Clix started screaming out loud and running from the one-way teamer to avoid the appearance of receiving a competitor’s beneficial items (again), then Clix abruptly backtracked to aggressively attack the one-way teamer for fear of appearing to be too non-confrontational or even intentionally leading the teamer. Audience members joked that Clix had a flashback from the PTSD of being banned, but Clix has made it clear to his viewers that being banned from the tournament really was a deeply serious, extremely stressful event for him (Clix, 2023). It was a serious threat to his career and reputation, and more generally it highlights the way in which streamers have a real burden of altering their gameplay to avoid the appearance of benefiting from one-way teamers.

These cases suggest that despite the attempts to address the controversy over teaming by appealing to competitors’ desires behind teaming, by moderating matches and by avoiding stream snipers, teaming remains an intractable problem for the battle-royale community. The teaming controversy lies in a tension between competitors’ desire for a sporting contest of skills in a battle-royale format on one hand, and on the other hand the fact that battle royale is basically, structurally permissive of nonsporting conditions like the volatile dynamics of teaming or third-partying. The basic setup of the battle royale genre seems to make teaming--however impermissible--always theoretically possible.

Collective Action Theory and Social Dilemmas

In the article “Tragedies of the Ludic Commons--Understanding Cooperation in Multiplayer Games,” the author Jonas Heide Smith uses collective action theory to understand how competitive games have cooperative aspects that give rise to social dilemmas (Smith, 2007). Understanding how these social dilemmas work is important for addressing social problems like cheating in online multiplayer games, including illicit teaming. Collective action theory is an economic lens that identifies the individualistic and cooperative forces in the production of collective goods. Individuals may have an incentive to enjoy the benefits of a collective good without contributing to its production, but without enough individuals cooperatively contributing, no individual could enjoy the benefits of a collective good. In this case there is a social dilemma, that is, when the individual and collective incentives are at odds in the production of a collective good.

An illustrative social dilemma is the problem of commons. This problem occurs when a collective good like global, environmental stability requires cooperation in, for example, not exterminating the last of any rare resource (like an endangered species), but the rarer a resource is, the more individuals are incentivized to capitalize on the resource. Social dilemmas are conflicts between a group and its individual members where individual members can benefit from “free-riding” so long as not so many members “free-ride” that the good of the group collapses, in which case there would be no benefit for any members. What counts as “free-riding” can vary greatly--Smith mentions cheating, griefing and irresponsible play (Smith, 2007). Here I am concerned with cheating as a social dilemma to better understand teaming.

On my reading of Smith’s analysis, cheating is a form of free-riding in a social dilemma insofar as cheating allows a competitor to gain a good--winning--at the cost of a greater collective good--having a sporting contest of skills. To clarify, team-based games normatively require cooperation between the members of a given team for the collective good of a team, namely winning. However, Smith points out that there is also a normative cooperation between otherwise competing teams because the greater collective good is a sporting contest of skills. Competitors cooperatively agree not to cheat to win, and this preserves the greater good of having sporting contest of skills. The collective good of a sporting contest of skills is greater than simply winning in the sense that a sporting contest can be enjoyed by all competitors, even losing teams. If players cheat, the contest is no longer about skills, so the remaining good is winning, and the collective good of a sporting contest of skills entirely collapses.

The use of a social-dilemma framework to address the problem of teaming has already been started by Rheem, Cho and Verma (Rheem et al., 2019). Here we have the idea that teaming can be prevented by interrupting the communication between teamers. For example, if competitors typically spin in place or rapidly duck and stand to initiate teaming, then perhaps matches could include bots (artificially intelligent competitors) who imitate this behavior but do not follow through on teaming. This would confuse competitors about which attempts to team are genuine, ultimately dissuading competitors from teaming. Other ideas from Rheem et al. include rushing competitors, separating competitors at the beginning of a match and separating competitors who have been previously flagged for teaming. Ultimately, it is important to dissuade teaming by altering the conditions of initial contact between competitors. I think Rheem et al.’s work can be extended further if we combine it with Smith’s analysis of collective goods and cheating in social dilemmas.

Illicit teaming, as a form of cheating, is a form of free-riding, and we might address teaming by applying Smith’s solutions. Smith first considers government as a solution to social dilemmas. Government would be parallel to the moderators of a match, that is, catching and banning teamers. However, we have seen above that teaming is a problem for even human moderators because teaming can appear identical to legitimate strategies at the end of a match. I would argue that Smith’s conceptual parallel for this problem is offensive-language censorship in online games, wherein Smith argues that moderators do not have a perfect way of determining what is sufficiently offensive to warrant censorship.

Smith also considers how “a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts” (Elinor Ostrom quoted in Smith, 2007). This solution primarily works when there is “a certain degree of permanence, the possibilities of monitoring the actions of other community members, and the prospect of future interaction” (Smith, 2007). In other words, like real marketplaces, cooperation is often obtained through systems of accountable reputation over time, for example, rating systems for online vendors/ buyers or for ride-share drivers/ passengers. Someone’s reputation for teaming may lead to their exclusion from a private clan, guild or association of battle-royale gamers.

Smith’s variety of solutions can be synthesized and extended to a wider, public base of players if competitors were to rate each over time in conjunction with automated moderators, perhaps leading to a reputation-based matchmaking system that parallels skill-based matchmaking. Reputation-based matchmaking could reward honest competitors by systematically matching them with other honest competitors and vice versa. Competitors who are repeatedly flagged for teaming might be matched more frequently with others who are flagged for teaming (as opposed to banning them). Of course, there would be disingenuous raters, but another system could filter out raters with anomalous behavior. Another difficulty would be applying such matchmaking to any game with anonymous competitors who can create new accounts to avoid the consequences of their reputation, but battle-royale games could require everyone to submit a verifiable personal identification to decrease the abuse of such fraudulent sock-puppet accounts. This is an extreme but not implausible solution to illicit teaming.

The Typology of Game Goals

Extending Smith’s economic framework to battle royale allowed us to imagine the extreme limits of solutions to illicit teaming as a social dilemma. One way to go beyond these limits is to rethink our implicit assumptions about the split goal of battle royale, namely winning and competing in a sporting contest of skills. What counts as a sporting contest of skills? Or, what counts as an even battlefield? To address this issue, we can begin with a broader theoretical examination of goals in games.

In the article “A Typology of Imperative Game Goals,” the authors Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera unpack the theoretical problem of what counts as the goal of a game (Debus et al., 2020). It can be easy to confuse a game’s goal with its end, with preventing its end, with getting points, with winning, with improving skills or with having a sporting contest of skills--these are very different things. There can exist a typology of game goals, but it must account for equivocations in casually framed goals. The authors note that the goal to “survive” or win in “the context of battle royale games” can be conceptually split between avoiding elimination and eliminating others, whether aggressively or passively (Debus et al., 2020).

Debus et al.’s analysis of surviving or winning can be extended to the goal of having a sporting contest of skills. I argue that it is important to recognize that a sporting contest of skills is conceptually split between a contest of skills where no competitor has an advantage on one hand and a contest where competitors use skills (not random conditions) to obtain an advantage on the other hand. This distinction allows us to recognize that the prohibition against teaming as “unfair” relies almost entirely on the first sense of a sporting contest of skills, that is, a contest where no competitor has an advantage. An extension of Debus et al.’s analysis allows us to see that this popular objection to teaming is not necessarily valid. If competitors must use skills to obtain an advantageous position, then it can be entirely sporting for one competitor to have an advantage over the other. Of course, the prohibition against teaming assumes that it takes no skill to obtain a cooperating competitor because the opportunity to team is randomly decided by the whims of competitors. But is this assumption valid? If we put Debus et al. together with Smith, we can raise the important question, is there a way to design battle royale such that skills are required for teaming?

Skillfully Regulating Teaming in Battle Royale

There are battle-royale video games that prohibit most forms of teaming yet permit teaming under specific conditions, and these games can contain mechanisms for skillfully regulating teaming to preserve a sporting contest of skills. For example, in 2020 the battle-royale mod of Fortnite added a recruiting mechanism that enables an artificially intelligent, Non-player character (NPC) to be hired to cooperate for the duration of the match (Çakir, 2021). These AI-controlled NPCs are not necessarily competitors, but they are potential competitors insofar as anyone can hire them to fight on their team. This mechanism satisfies the desire to recruit without entirely spoiling a contest of skills in Fortnite because the skill level of NPCs is artificially kept quite low. NPCs often clumsily expose the location of whoever hired them, which balances out the advantage they provide. Further, anyone may hire an NPC, so there is an equal opportunity to team. However, the number of hirable NPCs in a given location is limited, which makes the opportunity to team with an NPC somewhat precarious. This NPC-recruiting mechanism has the effect of making each match into a race to hire the only NPC in a given location, which then significantly skews the following fights. Yet, there is significant skill involved in a race to hire an NPC. In Fortnite this race looks like competitors skillfully timing their jump from a moving starting point (a flying autobus) and skillfully timing their deployment of a paraglider to get to a location as efficiently as possible. The NPC-recruiting mechanism is a small but not insignificant step toward regulating teaming such that obtaining a cooperative competitor requires skill, namely the skill of racing to a location as efficiently as possible. Nevertheless, there remain substantial concerns that hired NPCs ruin the fairness of the game (IMainSpyAndImNoWeeb, 2023; emotx, 2023).

The battle-royale video game Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2022) introduced a skillful regulatory mechanism for teaming called “assimilation” (Rain et al., 2022). There are four regulatory features of the assimilation mechanism. First, there is a communication option to explicitly invite a competitor to one’s team. The invited person can explicitly accept or reject the invitation to join the team. Second, the game prevents members of a team from damaging their teammates, and this mutual immunity extends to assimilated competitors. Third, assimilation is limited to teams that have lost a teammate. A player can assimilate as many competitors as teammates they have lost and no more. This also means that assimilation does not work in Solo competition modes. This mechanism prevents teaming from spoiling the contest of skills by keeping the maximum size of official teams consistent. Of course, it is still random whether or not a competitor accepts an invitation to team. Even when faced with the choice to be eliminated or cooperate with a competitor, players may simply choose to be eliminated, for example in order to spite an enemy or in order to begin a new match with the friends they had been playing with. A fourth feature of assimilation is that an assimilated competitor can choose to leave their team at any time. This is problematic for a sporting contest of skills insofar as it unevenly enables cunning betrayals through surprise defection. Of course, these regulatory mechanisms do not prevent unofficial, illicit teaming over the maximum size-permitted limit, but such illicit teaming would not have the protection of mutual immunity.

In November and December of 2022, Warzone 2.0 contained a Trios mode named “Unhinged” wherein the assimilation feature was no longer limited to a three-person team but a six-person team, meaning double the capacity of initial team sizes (Morton, 2022). In my view of player responses on reddit.com, Unhinged was polarizing for the Warzone fanbase (Boynus, 2022; Handbrake55, 2022; Infinitely_Infinity, 2022; Pmmeyourrocks, 2022; u/[deleted], 2022; C4ptainchr0nic, 2023). Defenders of Unhinged typically appealed to the fun of cunning alliances and betrayals, while others gave the usual complaints about teaming as an unskilled strategy.

Why was Unhinged removed from Warzone 2.0 on 14 December 2022? Fans of Unhinged wondered why they could not have an Unhinged mode while the complainers play a different mode more to their liking. We can make educated guesses about what happened based on player complaints. Unhinged had a problematic social and gameplay dynamic. First, players reported an increase in toxic communication (ThatOneRedditBro, 2022). Warzone 2.0 contains a mechanism called proximity chat wherein competitors can talk with one another if they are close enough to each other. This mechanism can be turned off, but proximity chat provides an advantage for inviting a competitor to team up, so Unhinged included more use of proximity chat relative to other game modes (SirDankz, 2022). The dynamics of competition and moreover betrayal seems to have encouraged toxic proximity chat between competitors. Complaints include the use of racial slurs. This made Unhinged extra problematic for popular streaming platforms that prohibited racist content. It is easy to imagine that the Unhinged mode was a liability in this sense, and I think proximity chat ultimately stifled the potential for Unhinged to further develop its explorations of regulated teaming via assimilation.

In terms of gameplay dynamics, players complained that the teaming dynamic in Unhinged effectively requires competitors to race to find a cooperative competitor if they are going to last to the end game, but not everyone can equally find a competitor. Competitors are incentivized to refuse cooperation in favor of betrayal to obtain the short-term benefits. Unlike Fortnite’s race to hire an NPC using a skillfully timed deployment, there was no parallel skill for racing to team up with another human competitor in Unhinged.

Conclusion

Further explorations in regulatory mechanisms for teaming can be developed on the basis of each element of teaming that would make it unskilled. Teaming is randomized or made unskilled by a number of things we can identify from the preceding analysis. We have seen that there has been randomness through an ambiguity in the communication of invitations to team, and the explicit invite function of assimilation resolves this issue. We have seen randomness in the whims of a teamer’s betrayal, and assimilation addresses this issue with mutual immunity to damage for competitors who accept an explicit invitation. Although assimilation currently allows teamers to defect at any time, which reintroduces the randomness of whimsical betrayals, it would be interesting to explore a mechanism that regulates defection by requiring a defection to be announced well ahead of time, say a thirty-second countdown until there is no more mutual immunity to damage. A defection countdown would eliminate the surprise element of defection.

Assimilation’s mechanism of explicit invitations currently does not address the randomness of the whims of competitor’s acceptance or rejection of an explicit invitation to team. However, the NPC-recruiting mechanism in Fortnite circumvents this randomness by forcing NPCs to accept the first invitation to team that they receive. We can easily imagine that assimilation can address the issue with human competitors similarly. When a competitor sends an explicit invitation to another competitor, a mechanism can make this invitation automatically accepted, immediately establishing damage immunity between the two competitors. Explicit invites would then be coercive invites, and the whims of the competitor’s interests in teaming no longer affect the opportunity to team.

I would argue that one current feature of assimilation is unnecessary to preserve a sporting contest of skills, namely a size cap on teams (inclusive of assimilated members). The idea of capping or limiting the combined size of a team is clearly meant to make the competition more even, but we have seen that a competition between unevenly sized teams can be sporting if teams use skills to retain teammates. Exploring the effects of different size caps for teaming would be interesting for future research, but a size cap is not necessarily needed to preserve a sporting contest of skills.

Given this robust revision of assimilation--coercive invitations, mutual immunity and a defection countdown but not necessarily with a size cap--the major randomizing elements of teaming are reduced, and skillful competition is preserved. However, new sets of issues emerge for the dynamics of teaming in battle royale, and game designers can benefit from exploring these new issues. I consider here a few questions for future research on the effects of skillful regulations of teaming in battle royale. What are different ways of regulating the duration of a coercive assimilation? What is the effect of implementing an indefinite duration until one member announces their defection? What is the effect of implementing a forced automatic defection of any assimilated members at the end of a match? What is the effect of establishing a determinate, short amount of time before auto-defection? What happens if competitors are given one or more options to renew their alliance? How can the ability to send a coercive invitation be distributed among players? What is the effect of giving players one or multiple chances to extend a coercive invitation at the beginning of the match? What happens if the ability to send a coercive invitation is regulated by possessing an in-game item to be found in the arena? What impact does the number of such items available make? How might the race to such items be regulated to require skills? What happens if an assimilated member can send a coercive invitation to a third party, and how might damage immunity be distributed in such a chain of assimilation? That is, if a first competitor coercively invites a second competitor, and the second competitor coercively invites a third competitor, do the first and third competitors have mutual immunity for the duration of the first assimilation? How can cooperation be encouraged between a coercive inviter and an assimilated member? What happens if teaming competitors receive bonuses by remaining proximate to one another? What happens if they receive penalties for straying too far from their teammates?

Finally, I want to note that robust mechanisms for skillfully regulating teaming can exist alongside prohibitions against teaming outside of these mechanisms, and in such a case skillfully regulating teaming would not really solve the intractable problem of illicit teaming. However, perhaps a well-regulated avenue for teaming would satisfy much of the desire to team, and there might be less incentive to team illicitly when official teaming offers sufficient protection against random betrayals. It remains to be seen how regulating the outlet of players’ drive to team will affect players’ engagement with prohibitive teaming.
References [Cut for Reddit Post Limit on Characters]

If anyone has logistics problems (as written in this old post), it's now available a shuttle bus back to the city center after the Rock in Roma concert (departing at 0:05) for 10€, the link is here:
https://www.eventinbus.com/autobus-concerto/baby-metal-bus-navetta-prima-partenza-25-06-2024_4155.html (some info in english)
(I'm not related to the service, just found the info) The bus stops at San Giovanni church, and goes to Rome Termini (the central station), where it could be easier to find an accomodation; also from the Rome Termini station after midnight there is a series o night buses to vairous locations of the city, that you can find using google maps.
The outward journey to arrive to Rock In Roma is easier, there is a nearby Capanelle train station or other bus lines.

Ciao! Vi riporto la mia situazione con Itabus.
Avevo acquistato un biglietto Itabus per un tragitto da Firenze con destinazione Napoli, ma è arrivato e partito da Firenze con un ritardo di oltre due ore e mezza.
Quando ho saputo dell'ingente ritardo del bus dalla piattaforma di tracking e, dopo un'ora di attesa a vuoto, ho provato a contattare l'assistenza clienti, che a) non ha nemmeno provato a offrire una soluzione alternativa (nonostante Itabus giuri di garantirla nella sua policy e nonostante sia stato fatto notare più volte il disagio causato, visto che ero in viaggio per un colloquio di lavoro) e b) mi ha informato che il ritardo deve superare i 120 minuti per poter richiedere il rimborso (soglia minima che in quel momento non si era raggiunta, ma poi decisamente superata).
Quando il bus è finalmente arrivato a Firenze con un ritardo di oltre due ore e mezza, ho provato a contattare l'assistenza clienti per la seconda volta, insistendo per il rimborso del biglietto, in quanto ItaBus, in caso di partenza con un ritardo superiore a 120 minuti, dispone quanto segue:
"I passeggeri hanno il diritto di scegliere tra: - il trasporto alternativo verso la destinazione finale a condizioni simili, non appena possibile e senza alcun onere aggiuntivo; - il rimborso del prezzo completo del biglietto e, ove opportuno, il ritorno gratuito al primo punto di partenza indicato nel contratto di trasporto, non appena possibile.
Lo stesso diritto di scegliere è applicabile se il servizio subisce una cancellazione o un ritardo alla partenza dalla fermata per oltre centoventi minuti. Il passeggero ha il diritto di ricevere un risarcimento pari al 50% del prezzo del biglietto: se il vettore non è in grado di fornire al passeggero nella situazione di cui sopra un rimborso o un reinstradamento su percorso alternativo."
(Diritto alla continuazione, al reinstradamento e al rimborso in caso di cancellazione o di ritardo prolungato; 4) Diritti del passeggero nel settore del trasporto con autobus, https://www.itabus.it/it/diritti-del-viaggiatore.html)
Il rimborso mi sarebbe stato negato perché, a detta del secondo operatore con cui ho parlato, il rimborso è possibile solo nel caso che il cliente non prenda più il bus (neppure se è in ritardo di oltre 120minuti). Nella policy che Itabus enuncia sul proprio sito, tuttavia, questa clausola del non poter più prendere lo stesso bus se si vuole chiedere il rimborso del biglietto, è omessa. E, in aggiunta, nessuna soluzione alternativa è mai stata proposta dal servizio di assistenza.
La causa di questo disagio, che Itabus non ha nemmeno provato a giustificare, mi è ignota. D'altro canto, come sempre indicato al Punto 4: "Se il viaggio viene interrotto a causa di un guasto all’autobus, il vettore deve inviare un autobus nel luogo in cui l’originale autobus si è arrestato per continuare il servizio e il trasporto dei passeggeri a destinazione oppure per trasportarli in un idoneo punto di attesa e/o una stazione dal cui il viaggio possa proseguire."
Misura di emergenza che, evidentemente, non è stata presa, altrimenti non avrei dovuto aspettare due ore e mezza in na parcheggio.
Ho provato a presentare un reclamo, ma Itabus si è rifiutato di procedere con il rimborso sostenendo che, stando al Regolamento (UE) 181/2011 sui diritti dei passeggeri nel trasporto con autobus, non è previsto alcun indennizzo in caso di ritardo maturato in percorrenza.
Dunque, chi ha ragione?

So I've been playing for a while and have 4 different characters around level 4. However, I still just let the game autobus my items.
How much better is it if you buy your own items? How do I even learn which ones are best to buy? Is there a pre-selection option so I don't have to hunt through the shop everytime (on console)?

I am traveling from Budapest to Ljubljana, and would MUCH prefer to take a train than the flixbus. It looks like a section of the train is out, and so you have to transfer into a bus and then into another train. The issue is that the transfer from the first train to the bus seems to only have a five minute window! Is there a way to know if the bus would wait for the train, given it’s a known interruption that’s been in place for multiple months?
For reference it’s the 40962 vonatpotlo autobus that runs from Balatonszentgyorgy to Zalaegerszeg. I don’t want to take a flixbus for six and a half hours but I sure don’t want to get stuck in a city if I mess it up! Thanks for the help.

Hello! I´m flying to Rome this oncoming September with a friend but before setting our bags in Rome, we want to stay for a few days in San Felice Circeo - we do know it´s about an hour or so a ride in car, but we won´t have any car or rent any car, so which is the other way to go there?
Is there any bus that can take us there? And if so, is there any way I can get the hours? Like a website or something like that - I mean, because we want to depart early and take a flight to Palermo, so to do that we first need to know around which hours the bus leave back to Rome :(
----
CIAO! A settembre andrò a Roma con un amico, ma prima di restare in città, vogliamo fermarci qualche giorno a San Felice Circeo: sappiamo che è a circa un'ora di macchina, ma non avremo né macchina né noleggio qualche macchina, allora qual è l'altro modo per arrivarci?
C'è qualche autobus che può portarci lì? E se sì, c'è un modo per ottenere gli orari? Tipo un sito web o qualcosa del genere - voglio dire, perché vogliamo partire presto e prendere un volo per Palermo, quindi per fare questo dobbiamo prima sapere in quali orari parte l'autobus per tornare a Roma

I'm planning to travel within the Italy on a budget and I want to use the regional train pass. While searching in the lefrecce.it I selected the regional train from the filters to see if it's possible to do the trip.
It's possible, but I'm seeing options like MEDIOPADANA LINK (autobus) and Frecciarossa (regional fast train that requires reservation) If anyone has an experience is it possible for you to enlighten me? Thank you very much!!
(Also, once I bought do pass, do i need to do any kind of reservation?)

Ok so im in the bus and as im about to come down and this African uncle(i say african because we call every older male uncle, but their not our biological uncle) that was in the bus with me greets me and ask's me where im going.
Info:i recently transfered because my mother is obsessed with the fact that in our old city everyone was agains her and she kept distancing herself from everyone that was helping her. My Dad died from smoking and drinking too much( was litterly told he had 6 months to live if he didn't stop but he still continued and died) and my mom is convinced the whole city planned for him to die spiritually and the smoking and drinking had nothing to do with it.
So i had my keys in my hand and my bookbag, my first thing to say was home(my mom never instructed me on what to say in this situation) so after i said that the uncle brought out his hand i thought he wanted me to shak it but he gave me money instead, i told him i didn't want it and was trying to hand it back but by that point the autobus doors were closing and i had too leave.
As soon as i told my mom i was met with shouts and told how stupid and useless i am, how i want people to kill me and again how stupid i am. According to her: -The man didn't do anything to her, she's afraid he will tell people that she changed city -she complained that i accepted the money -she complained that the amount was too much -she told me never to lie but she's also mad i told the truth. -she also kept the money??
I will admit i could be wrong for saying that i was headed home, but honestly i was rushing, my keys were in my hand, the bus door were opening and its the first thing that came to mind. But i just don't understand the exaggerated reaction because I TRIED REJECTING THE MONEY, i don't understand how im so horrible in this situation. Aita? I feel like im not the asshole but need reassurance of it or i actually am and i don't think i am.

Btw im from Europe(someone told me i should specify that). Ok so im in the bus and as im about to come down this African uncle (in the bus) that i know greets me and ask's me where im going.
Info:i recently transfered because my mother is obsessed with the fact that in our old city everyone was agains her and she kept distancing herself from everyone that was helping her. My Dad died from smoking and drinking too much( was litterly told he had 6 months to live if he didn't stop but he still continued and died) and my mom is convinced the whole city planned for him to die spiritually and the smoking and drinking had nothing to do with it.
So i had my keys in my hand and my bookbag, my first thing to say was home(my mom never instructed me on what to say in this situation) so after i said that the uncle brought out his hand i thought he wanted me to shak it but he gave me money instead, i told him i didn't want it and was trying to hand it back but by that point the autobus doors were closing and i had too leave.
As soon as i told my mom i was met with shouts and told how stupid and useless i am, how i want people to kill me and again how stupid i am. According to her: -The man didn't do anything to her, she's afraid he will tell people that she changed city -she complained that i accepted the money -she complained that the amount was too small -she told me never to lie but she's also mad i told the truth. -she also kept the money??
I will admit i could be wrong for saying that i was headed home, but honestly i was rushing, my keys were in my hand, the bus door were opening and its the first thing that came to mind. But i just don't understand the exaggerated reaction because I TRIED REJECTING THE MONEY, i don't understand how im so horrible in this situation. Aita?

I understand that german is similar to english and the long words that mean one concept are basically different words put together.
So i got this question.
Bus stop, or parada de autobus in spanish is Bushaltestelle
So it makes sense that bus-halt is the simil to bus stop.
But the bus stop place is haltestelle. So, what is the estelle part from?
Estelle via google translator means estela in spanish, like a flash of light.
I know it must not be the real meaning, but im wondering abput the etimology of the word.
I googled it but got no satisfactory answer.

21M, spíš introvert, pracuju v IT, s moc lidmi se do kontaktu nedostávám, a rád bych to změnil. Mám rád svět počítačů a všechno okolo, což mě táhne k počítači víc než k čemukoliv jinému.
Jenže jak (nebo spíš kde?) mám někoho zhruba v mém věku najít? Ať už to jsou lidi s podobnými zájmy nebo ne (i když nevím, jak by to bez společných zájmů fungovalo), nemám moc nápadů.
Na návštěvu knihovny ve snaze s někým prohodit slovo končím práci pozdě, a kdo by se bavil v knihovně, kam se stejně lidi chodí spíš učit a v tichosti soustředit.
V autobuse jsou zas všichni zahledění do mobilů, nebo jsou lidi ve skupinách, ale i v ostatních případech si neumím představit, že bych někoho z ničeho nic v buse oslovil, natož nějakou slečnu.
VŠ jsem několikrát zkusil dálkově v Praze, tam jsem další dálkaře nějaké našel, ale dost jich postupně přestalo dojíždět z různých důvodů - včetně mě. A co se ještě týče VŠ, tak místní JČU nepřipadá v úvahu - dálkově informatiku (a mnohem víc) dálkově nenabízejí. Kvůli práci a zájmům bych stejně nestudoval celého bakaláře, ale třeba jen něco, co by mě opravdu zaujalo. To by mi hledání lidí s podobnými zájmy aspoň trochu ulehčilo, ale jednotlivé kurzy se tady taky nenabízí ani v rámci celoživotního vzdělávání. Takže škola mi v tom prostě nepomůže.
Parky, ve kterých se ve filmech a seriálech (:D) lidi údajně setkávají, tu prakticky nejsou, nákupní centra mi přijdou jak ty autobusy, nebo se mi zdá, že se to prostě nehodí, no nevím. O online seznamkách nemluvě, to snad ani nemá smysl.
Máte nějaké další nápady? Nebo se k tomu stavím úplně špatně?

Volevi sapere il parere del popolo di reddit.
Cosa ne pensate della proposta di abolire il bollo auto, eliminando cosi l'appuntamento annuale al pagamento della tassa e tutta la struttura sotto per i controlli, compensando la perdita con un incremento sulle accise sui carburanti?
Vantaggi:
-Riduzione di burocrazia
-Riduzione di frodi
-Aumento di immatricolazioni di auto di lusso(è come se abolissi il superbollo)
-Paga di più chi consuma di più( e non semplicemente chi usa di più l'auto). Pensate chi usa l'auto tutti i giorni ma ha un veicolo che consuma poco.

• Risparmio per numerosi possessori di veicoli che magari lo usano poco.

Svantaggi
-Aumento della accisa di circa 0,16 centesimi(fonte in fondo)
-Costo sostenuto maggiore per chi vive fuori dalla città e chi non possiede auto moderne(o che consumano poco)
Opportunità

• una maggiore spinta a trasporti alternativi come autobus e treni per poter pagare meno di tasse. Di si spingerebbe ad utilizzare i veicoli solo allo stretto necessario(quando non ci sono alternative) e a consumare di meno.

fonte:
https://www.today.it/politica/legge-bollo-auto.html

Volevi sapere il parere del popolo di reddit.
Cosa ne pensate della proposta di abolire il bollo auto, eliminando cosi l'appuntamento annuale al pagamento della tassa e tutta la struttura sotto per i controlli, compensando la perdita con un incremento sulle accise sui carburanti?
Vantaggi:
-Riduzione di burocrazia
-Riduzione di frodi
-Aumento di immatricolazioni di auto di lusso(è come se abolissi il superbollo)
-Paga di più chi consuma di più( e non semplicemente chi usa di più l'auto). Pensate chi usa l'auto tutti i giorni ma ha un veicolo che consuma poco.

• Risparmio per numerosi possessori di veicoli che magari lo usano poco.

Svantaggi
-Aumento della accisa di circa 0,16 centesimi(fonte in fondo)
-Costo sostenuto maggiore per chi vive fuori dalla città e chi non possiede auto moderne(o che consumano poco)
Opportunità

• una maggiore spinta a trasporti alternativi come autobus e treni per poter pagare meno di tasse. Di si spingerebbe ad utilizzare i veicoli solo allo stretto necessario(quando non ci sono alternative) e a consumare di meno.

fonte:
https://www.today.it/politica/legge-bollo-auto.html