Please explain. This is the first I've heard of this and I find it exceedingly disturbing.
Basically, there is an auto-ban system designed to combat gold-spammers, which is a laudable goal. However, it's seemingly been designed by utterly brainless idiots, as the way it works is that it's triggered by certain unknown keywords or phrases which might only bear a very vague, passing resemblance to gold-spam if you looked at it cross-eyed in a darkened room, and you're only given a single warning that is somewhat vague, easy to miss and easy to inadvertently deactivate before being smacked across the chops by the banhammer.
Sounds like another case caused by Cryptic's "ingenious" automated ban system. Seriously it is pure lazy, they need to hire REAL people to do bans.
This. Its not the first time this thing has done something stupid, remember that guy that got banned for saying the first thing he did that day was cut 3mm off a cabinet?
This seriously needs to change. Whoever wrote that parser did a very, very poor job, to say the least. If they can't fix it they need to disable it until they can
Basically, there is an auto-ban system designed to combat gold-spammers, which is a laudable goal. However, it's seemingly been designed by utterly brainless idiots, as the way it works is that it's triggered by certain unknown keywords or phrases which might only bear a very vague, passing resemblance to gold-spam if you looked at it cross-eyed in a darkened room, and you're only given a single warning that is somewhat vague, easy to miss and easy to inadvertently deactivate before being smacked across the chops by the banhammer.
Sums it up rather well. Keep in mind that this vague warning is also a system message - which people were told to disable to stop those lockbox messages flooding peoples screens. Most did, and clearly now aren't getting the messages
Please explain. This is the first I've heard of this and I find it exceedingly disturbing.
With the last patch, Cryptic inserted some sort of chat monitor/auto ban system. This was meant (we believe) to catch those who were spam advertising the name of certain third party web sites, but it seems to have caught a LOT of people who were just having normal discussions.
The reaction from cryptic so far has been to unban MOST people who were caught by this, as long as they submit a GM ticket and wait for proper review (which has taken anywhere from an hour to two weeks for different people), but they haven't changed the auto ban system as far as we know.
Plus, it's not really clear which words or phrases could get some one banned. A few of them are known (third party EC selling web site names) but a lot of people seem to get banned for random words or phrases which have no apparent importance.
So I was being sort of snarky with my response, but the only way to be absolutely sure you won't be banned from STO by an automated process is to not communicate in any way within STO.
And yes, this is ridiculous, which some of us have tried to make clear, but (I think) this policy must be coming from fairly high in the corporate chain of command, because there's no sign that it's being changed. Branflakes (the lead CS presence on the web forums) has said that it is working as designed.
unless this auto-ban just went in affect this week. it nt doing it job very well especially since lor went live. i seen them quite often. i know a person was tyelling us he was going gold and got ban
unless this auto-ban just went in affect this week. it nt doing it job very well especially since lor went live. i seen them quite often. i know a person was tyelling us he was going gold and got ban
Hilarious! Now it autobans players that say "I buy gold" meaning a VIP subscribtion & not visiting goldfarming sites?
I should not laugh because its bad. But if thats true its seriously so dumb-stupidly bad that its funny!
Whats the next ultimate plan to be 100000% sure to get rid of EC-sellers/buyers? Pull the plug from the server? Yeah, that will show them :rolleyes:
So I was being sort of snarky with my response, but the only way to be absolutely sure you won't be banned from STO by an automated process is to not communicate in any way within STO.
Snarky or not, from the way everyone is describing it, it sounds like literal truth.
Thank you, folks, for your response. This is troubling.
And there were more then 6-7 threads earlier today, so I'm assuming either the people complaining deleted them, or someone else did.
And thanks for the RSA link, helped make a little sense.
Thats part of PWE's attempt to cover up what they have done, anytime a new thread about this pops up they combine it into this one to hide the issue in the bugs forum, even though they have said its not a bug and they are ****ing us as intended.
What about gold membership
Gold pressed latinum
My pips are gold
My combadge is gold
Gold lockboxes, very rare nowadays but still)
Not to mention there's probably countless other times we'd use the word gold in chat, this ban system is getting sillier and sillier as it goes on! Come on Cryptic/PWE, you need a new approach, that much should be clear by now.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
Well my ban got lifted this morning so they responded very quickly. However this is still kind of worrying. What words do we need to avoid? It would help if they told us but then I guess that would help the spammers also.
Irony , ok still waiting on day 8. no official response from cryptic, Except that I had two tickets on the same issue, so they were deleting one but never addressed the issue.
Thanks PWI!! You have time to look at the tickets, delete one but not respond on the first one you did not delete.
I can't believe that the last time I read this thread was a week ago since two of are alliances mates was banned and reinstated within few hours, and here today I'm seeing the same victims of this crazy ban. :mad:
To be honest the lack of communication from PWE on this subject coupled with watching this has just kinda turned me off the game. Nice expansion and you've put a lot into Romulans and all but with PWE treating it's customers with contempt and the grind missions not being very engaging I won't be playing the game much or at all. I hope you get unbanned soon sirkoric
I'm wondering if we should introduce a Compensation System for banned players.
I mean, while you are banned, you can't play the game as normal, which will add a delay to whatever goal you might be working towards ingame.
And Cryptic should be obligated to give you whatever you missed out on, since it is their fault you are unable to play.
If I was unfortunate enough to be accidentally banned, I know exactly what my daily tasks are and how much I should be allocated per day of inactivity.
This is what I do each day in STO:
Nukara Reputation.
2000 Nukura Reputation per character.
340 Dilithium per character.
28 Nukara Marks per character.
Fleet Marks.
100 Fleet Marks for my Starfleet character.
And that's what I would be owed for each day of inactivity!
And yes, the silence on this issue I find highly suspicious.
If you can't defend a poor decision (and I sincerely doubt they can defend this one), you just don't say anything at all.
Especially when the company involved is adamant we keep the autobann system, even though it's been proven time and again how flawed it is.
An analogy, what if I sold the Air Force a fighter aircraft that randomly activated the pilot ejection system if the pilot pressed the wrong button?
How quickly do you think I'd be sued and forced to fix the problem in the design?
And as an aside, my opinion of the phrase "working as intended"
Autoban Dev: It's working as intended.
<crunch snap scream>
Irate Banned Player: This baseball bat breaking your legs, also working as intended.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
You're not really entitled to anything if you're a free player however I would argue that if you have been banned for more than a week and had paid for a subscription then you might have grounds for compensation.
I'm not talking about a lifetime sub where it's there indefinitely, we're talking a months subscription whereby you have been denied the use of that unfairly. I would think such players are entitled to being credited the days they missed due to an over zealous ban. I would think a court would certainly say the ToS as applied in this instance were unfair and illegal especially if no compensation was given.
Fortunately I'm not affected so I have no reason to inquire
Yeah, I know Cryptic won't really do anything to compensate players who are banned.
But hypothetically, if there was a penalty system for unjust bans, they'd be more motivated to fix the problem.
They'd also be faster about getting an account unbanned, since every day that goes by is more penalty they have to pay out.
In the real world though, you would not get away with that.
If you make a mistake of this order, there are consequences, usually a court ordered compensation payment to the victim.
But who knows?
If this goes on long enough, Cryptic may indeed discover there are consequences, even if it doesn't result in a legal verdict against them.
Public opinion is a powerful thing and if it turns against Cryptic, they will suffer for it in the long term with reduced players, bad publicity and lost income due to players not purchasing subscriptions, c-points and c-store items.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
(SNIP)
I'm not talking about a lifetime sub where it's there indefinitely, we're talking a months subscription whereby you have been denied the use of that unfairly.
(SNIP)
That's a bit gray area, but it can be argued that in lifetime subscription you pay for 'all the months, for as long as the game is alive', or 'for all the months, as long as I have interest to the game'. You've still paid for any days during which you would have liked to play, but couldn't. As such, it reduces the value of what you paid for.
So quoting someone who was banned is a bannable offense? cause that's what happend to me... :eek::(:mad:
Part of the problem is that nobody actually knows what will get you banned, or even what this system is designed to ban you for, except in very general terms (namely, that it's supposed to cut down or eliminate goldspam). However, despite numerous reports of auto-bans caused by things only very, very loosely connected with goldspam, if it's connected at all, and despite the fact that some (but not all) of these bans have apparently since been lifted, the last official word of this can be summarised as, "This is actually working as intended, but we're considering changing the way the warning is displayed."
In other words, they are considering doing something which might solve one relatively minor part of the problem, but have seemingly indicated that the rest of the problem is a feature, not a bug.
You're not really entitled to anything if you're a free player however I would argue that if you have been banned for more than a week and had paid for a subscription then you might have grounds for compensation
You're entitled to get what you paid for. If for example you were banned for 4 days, you are legally entitled to have those 4 days added to your sub, otherwise cryptic would be violating the service agreement they made when a person signed up for a paid account. The person pays for 30 days, not 26. They are guaranteed by law to get what they paid for.
Just making that clear
Seriously?
A ban for using Gold now?
What about gold membership
Gold pressed latinum
My pips are gold
My combadge is gold
Gold lockboxes, very rare nowadays but still)
Not to mention there's probably countless other times we'd use the word gold in chat, this ban system is getting sillier and sillier as it goes on! Come on Cryptic/PWE, you need a new approach, that much should be clear by now.
Indeed. Cryptic needs to assign a programmer that actually knows how to properly use a parser and regular expressions, if they insist on using this absurd autobanning TRIBBLE
Part of the problem is that nobody actually knows what will get you banned, or even what this system is designed to ban you for, except in very general terms (namely, that it's supposed to cut down or eliminate goldspam). However, despite numerous reports of auto-bans caused by things only very, very loosely connected with goldspam, if it's connected at all, and despite the fact that some (but not all) of these bans have apparently since been lifted, the last official word of this can be summarised as, "This is actually working as intended, but we're considering changing the way the warning is displayed."
In other words, they are considering doing something which might solve one relatively minor part of the problem, but have seemingly indicated that the rest of the problem is a feature, not a bug.
Compounding the problem is that there is no warning per se. You get a automatic response indicating a language filter has been put in place. No warning that you are likely to get banned, and no confirmation e-mail when it has happened. You are left completely in the dark aside from not being able to log into your account. From looking through this thread, it also seems for many it's beyond a reasonable amount of time as well. If they're still charging for services on top of that... it's a very expensive mistake on their part.
They need to fix this somewhat because it's literally a lawsuit waiting to happen. In addition, because they're located in the state of California, many of their disclaimers in their TOS are also null and void. Both SOE and Blizzard have learned this the hard way even when banning accounts for exploits.
To be honest the lack of communication from PWE on this subject coupled with watching this has just kinda turned me off the game. Nice expansion and you've put a lot into Romulans and all but with PWE treating it's customers with contempt and the grind missions not being very engaging I won't be playing the game much or at all. I hope you get unbanned soon sirkoric
I agree completely. Just before I found out about this thread I was beginning to think that there may be a small chance I would play something else associated with either Cryptic or PWE at some point in the future, assuming that there was a period of AT LEAST 3 years good customer service and consideration shown. However the lack of response and apparent utter indifference demonstrated on this matter has convinced me that my previous intentions to avoid both companies was indeed the correct choice. I am a console gamer also and the only reason I never purchased a PS3 was due to SOE's complete shambolic handling of the SWG MMO following the much maligned Combat Upgrade. This likely lost Sony somewhere in the region of ?1000-?1500 from myself alone (I know I wasn't the only one) considering the cost of the console and game purchases over it's life cycle. I have already stated that I now regret buying the LoR expansion, not because I didn't enjoy it but because I'm annoyed at myself for funding such uncaring companies. Foolishly I thought things were changing for the better and decided to once again fund the game (the only reason I'm still playing being that I originally purchased an LTS).
I have just returned from the BigIF rally in Hyde Park London where myself and others demonstrated yesterday to make the leaders at the forthcoming G8 summit take action on world hunger (something unacceptable in the 21st century). One of the points being made there was the issue of company transparency. Whilst I would not group either Cryptic or PWE in the same list of 'EVIL' companies responsible for perpetuating world hunger due to their greed, I would advise them to remember their player base, that is to say, greatly composed of Star Trek fans. The difference being that most of us true trekkers have an innate sense of what is fair and what is not, given the many ethical and hypothetical situations presented throughout the various series. For any employee from either of these companies that considers himself or herself a true trekker I would ask you to ask yourself, "What is fair and what would Star Trek fans think of your handling of the situation?"
what did i do???? i was talking to my dad on the game and i get banned do you know that is messed up? im in california and hes in texas!!!! that makes me mad!!!! who would do that to me? i am one of the most freindly players in the game and i get banned? i showed my friends they are real mad right now, i am fleet commander i have duties to do.
Comments
Please explain. This is the first I've heard of this and I find it exceedingly disturbing.
| Join Date: January 2009 | Computer | Fleet: Broken Wings |
Basically, there is an auto-ban system designed to combat gold-spammers, which is a laudable goal. However, it's seemingly been designed by utterly brainless idiots, as the way it works is that it's triggered by certain unknown keywords or phrases which might only bear a very vague, passing resemblance to gold-spam if you looked at it cross-eyed in a darkened room, and you're only given a single warning that is somewhat vague, easy to miss and easy to inadvertently deactivate before being smacked across the chops by the banhammer.
This. Its not the first time this thing has done something stupid, remember that guy that got banned for saying the first thing he did that day was cut 3mm off a cabinet?
This seriously needs to change. Whoever wrote that parser did a very, very poor job, to say the least. If they can't fix it they need to disable it until they can
Sums it up rather well. Keep in mind that this vague warning is also a system message - which people were told to disable to stop those lockbox messages flooding peoples screens. Most did, and clearly now aren't getting the messages
And there were more then 6-7 threads earlier today, so I'm assuming either the people complaining deleted them, or someone else did.
And thanks for the RSA link, helped make a little sense.
With the last patch, Cryptic inserted some sort of chat monitor/auto ban system. This was meant (we believe) to catch those who were spam advertising the name of certain third party web sites, but it seems to have caught a LOT of people who were just having normal discussions.
The reaction from cryptic so far has been to unban MOST people who were caught by this, as long as they submit a GM ticket and wait for proper review (which has taken anywhere from an hour to two weeks for different people), but they haven't changed the auto ban system as far as we know.
Plus, it's not really clear which words or phrases could get some one banned. A few of them are known (third party EC selling web site names) but a lot of people seem to get banned for random words or phrases which have no apparent importance.
So I was being sort of snarky with my response, but the only way to be absolutely sure you won't be banned from STO by an automated process is to not communicate in any way within STO.
And yes, this is ridiculous, which some of us have tried to make clear, but (I think) this policy must be coming from fairly high in the corporate chain of command, because there's no sign that it's being changed. Branflakes (the lead CS presence on the web forums) has said that it is working as designed.
Hilarious! Now it autobans players that say "I buy gold" meaning a VIP subscribtion & not visiting goldfarming sites?
I should not laugh because its bad. But if thats true its seriously so dumb-stupidly bad that its funny!
Whats the next ultimate plan to be 100000% sure to get rid of EC-sellers/buyers? Pull the plug from the server? Yeah, that will show them :rolleyes:
Snarky or not, from the way everyone is describing it, it sounds like literal truth.
Thank you, folks, for your response. This is troubling.
Thats part of PWE's attempt to cover up what they have done, anytime a new thread about this pops up they combine it into this one to hide the issue in the bugs forum, even though they have said its not a bug and they are ****ing us as intended.
Ouch!
And like I cited earlier, saying Gold is very common in Champions Online, since it's a unit of measurement of their ingame currency!
Are they going to get banned now?
And what about the worlds Energy Credits or the common acryonym EC?
We use that a lot and I bet the goldspammers do too!
Welcome to STO, please try not to use the chat or your newly activated account will become a newly deactived account!
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
A ban for using Gold now?
What about gold membership
Gold pressed latinum
My pips are gold
My combadge is gold
Gold lockboxes, very rare nowadays but still)
Not to mention there's probably countless other times we'd use the word gold in chat, this ban system is getting sillier and sillier as it goes on! Come on Cryptic/PWE, you need a new approach, that much should be clear by now.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
Thanks PWI!! You have time to look at the tickets, delete one but not respond on the first one you did not delete.
*groans*
SHAME ON YOU CRYPTIC!!
REINSTATED ALL SO WE CAN ALL HAVE FUN AGAIN!!
Zab
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
I mean, while you are banned, you can't play the game as normal, which will add a delay to whatever goal you might be working towards ingame.
And Cryptic should be obligated to give you whatever you missed out on, since it is their fault you are unable to play.
If I was unfortunate enough to be accidentally banned, I know exactly what my daily tasks are and how much I should be allocated per day of inactivity.
This is what I do each day in STO:
Nukara Reputation.
2000 Nukura Reputation per character.
340 Dilithium per character.
28 Nukara Marks per character.
Fleet Marks.
100 Fleet Marks for my Starfleet character.
And that's what I would be owed for each day of inactivity!
And yes, the silence on this issue I find highly suspicious.
If you can't defend a poor decision (and I sincerely doubt they can defend this one), you just don't say anything at all.
Especially when the company involved is adamant we keep the autobann system, even though it's been proven time and again how flawed it is.
An analogy, what if I sold the Air Force a fighter aircraft that randomly activated the pilot ejection system if the pilot pressed the wrong button?
How quickly do you think I'd be sued and forced to fix the problem in the design?
And as an aside, my opinion of the phrase "working as intended"
Autoban Dev: It's working as intended.
<crunch snap scream>
Irate Banned Player: This baseball bat breaking your legs, also working as intended.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
You're not really entitled to anything if you're a free player however I would argue that if you have been banned for more than a week and had paid for a subscription then you might have grounds for compensation.
I'm not talking about a lifetime sub where it's there indefinitely, we're talking a months subscription whereby you have been denied the use of that unfairly. I would think such players are entitled to being credited the days they missed due to an over zealous ban. I would think a court would certainly say the ToS as applied in this instance were unfair and illegal especially if no compensation was given.
Fortunately I'm not affected so I have no reason to inquire
It is through repetition that we learn our weakness.
A master with a stone is better than a novice with a sword.
Has damage got out of control?
This is the last thing I will post.
But hypothetically, if there was a penalty system for unjust bans, they'd be more motivated to fix the problem.
They'd also be faster about getting an account unbanned, since every day that goes by is more penalty they have to pay out.
In the real world though, you would not get away with that.
If you make a mistake of this order, there are consequences, usually a court ordered compensation payment to the victim.
But who knows?
If this goes on long enough, Cryptic may indeed discover there are consequences, even if it doesn't result in a legal verdict against them.
Public opinion is a powerful thing and if it turns against Cryptic, they will suffer for it in the long term with reduced players, bad publicity and lost income due to players not purchasing subscriptions, c-points and c-store items.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
That's a bit gray area, but it can be argued that in lifetime subscription you pay for 'all the months, for as long as the game is alive', or 'for all the months, as long as I have interest to the game'. You've still paid for any days during which you would have liked to play, but couldn't. As such, it reduces the value of what you paid for.
Part of the problem is that nobody actually knows what will get you banned, or even what this system is designed to ban you for, except in very general terms (namely, that it's supposed to cut down or eliminate goldspam). However, despite numerous reports of auto-bans caused by things only very, very loosely connected with goldspam, if it's connected at all, and despite the fact that some (but not all) of these bans have apparently since been lifted, the last official word of this can be summarised as, "This is actually working as intended, but we're considering changing the way the warning is displayed."
In other words, they are considering doing something which might solve one relatively minor part of the problem, but have seemingly indicated that the rest of the problem is a feature, not a bug.
You're entitled to get what you paid for. If for example you were banned for 4 days, you are legally entitled to have those 4 days added to your sub, otherwise cryptic would be violating the service agreement they made when a person signed up for a paid account. The person pays for 30 days, not 26. They are guaranteed by law to get what they paid for.
Just making that clear
Indeed. Cryptic needs to assign a programmer that actually knows how to properly use a parser and regular expressions, if they insist on using this absurd autobanning TRIBBLE
Compounding the problem is that there is no warning per se. You get a automatic response indicating a language filter has been put in place. No warning that you are likely to get banned, and no confirmation e-mail when it has happened. You are left completely in the dark aside from not being able to log into your account. From looking through this thread, it also seems for many it's beyond a reasonable amount of time as well. If they're still charging for services on top of that... it's a very expensive mistake on their part.
They need to fix this somewhat because it's literally a lawsuit waiting to happen. In addition, because they're located in the state of California, many of their disclaimers in their TOS are also null and void. Both SOE and Blizzard have learned this the hard way even when banning accounts for exploits.
I agree completely. Just before I found out about this thread I was beginning to think that there may be a small chance I would play something else associated with either Cryptic or PWE at some point in the future, assuming that there was a period of AT LEAST 3 years good customer service and consideration shown. However the lack of response and apparent utter indifference demonstrated on this matter has convinced me that my previous intentions to avoid both companies was indeed the correct choice. I am a console gamer also and the only reason I never purchased a PS3 was due to SOE's complete shambolic handling of the SWG MMO following the much maligned Combat Upgrade. This likely lost Sony somewhere in the region of ?1000-?1500 from myself alone (I know I wasn't the only one) considering the cost of the console and game purchases over it's life cycle. I have already stated that I now regret buying the LoR expansion, not because I didn't enjoy it but because I'm annoyed at myself for funding such uncaring companies. Foolishly I thought things were changing for the better and decided to once again fund the game (the only reason I'm still playing being that I originally purchased an LTS).
I have just returned from the BigIF rally in Hyde Park London where myself and others demonstrated yesterday to make the leaders at the forthcoming G8 summit take action on world hunger (something unacceptable in the 21st century). One of the points being made there was the issue of company transparency. Whilst I would not group either Cryptic or PWE in the same list of 'EVIL' companies responsible for perpetuating world hunger due to their greed, I would advise them to remember their player base, that is to say, greatly composed of Star Trek fans. The difference being that most of us true trekkers have an innate sense of what is fair and what is not, given the many ethical and hypothetical situations presented throughout the various series. For any employee from either of these companies that considers himself or herself a true trekker I would ask you to ask yourself, "What is fair and what would Star Trek fans think of your handling of the situation?"
what did i do???? i was talking to my dad on the game and i get banned do you know that is messed up? im in california and hes in texas!!!! that makes me mad!!!! who would do that to me? i am one of the most freindly players in the game and i get banned? i showed my friends they are real mad right now, i am fleet commander i have duties to do.
www.captainschannel.webs.com visit my site to talk to people with the same problem im having