I realize I'm very late to the discussion, but I personally feel any auto-ban system, which can be triggered by fellow players no less, is insane on the face of it. It's recklessly irresponsible, even. There's just too much spite going on in the world; too much grinding of axes, and too many people who will abuse this feature.
Equally insane is banning on typing a simple word. Imagine people being auto-sent to prison, just because someone heard them say the word 'murder.' Without context, doing something as draconian as banning someone (which really should be an ultimum remedium only) is really true insanity. Banning someone should, at all time, be a human decision, made after careful deliberation.
I'm a longtime player and this is my favorite game to spend my free time on. I generally like Cryptic and try not to get too upset. They are cool guys. However, I recently endured an unjust auto-ban for over three weeks that could have gone on even longer, and I think it would be helpful to many if I shared my experiences in this thread.
I was ungracefully ban-hammer'd on May 26th by a mindless script ticking away on a line of code somewhere in a machine while trying to help my fleetmate understand, shun, and report gold seller botspam. Factoring in my awareness of the nightmarish ticket backlog caused by LoR, I felt sympathy for my fellow man and woman in the PWE Customer Support Crew and decided to wait patiently for my ticket to be processed naturally, running with only the most optimistic and logical assumptions.
After all, we do know that players are extremely valued and should never be punished or treated as expendable collateral in the addressing of another issue (read: gold farmer sting operation) that is beyond their control; this sole tenant is the basis of not just good customer service, but the very core of good game design itself, yes?
Thus, should that unfortunate situation arise, of course it would be logical to assume that they will take immediate steps to address the unjustly affected first. And also perhaps, if they could afford the initiative, make it protocol to place the affected on some kind of accelerated track, to stave off the feelings of victimization and bleeding customer loyalty as soon as possible. With these assumptions of how a good CS service is run, I kept my mouth shut, and I kindly waited. A daily ritual of seeing these messages in sequence began. "Retrieving list of characters ... -> Your account has been banned", and it would have helped a lot if they appended the words, "- for something you did not do" to that last part.
===
Today, I would like to report the insights that I have gained, and how wrong I was to make the assumptions above.
It took 23 days for my account to be reinstated but only thanks to Mr. Bran Flakes, who kindly helped to manage the ticket prioritization for my case. Unbanning was immediate and Mr. Flake's responses were awesome and friendly, after I realized that my patience towards the situation had been drained, and I called for his help. Just to try something different. I must express that I do not think I would have gotten help in due time without his bran-tervention. I must also point out that nearly everyone who posted in this thread has been attended to, since he does read this thread, but there are many more like me who haven't spoken up and have not been serviced. (In fact, this is my very first forum post.)
If you or a fleetmate that you know is still affected by this toxic decision to employ automatic, chat-based instant banning, do not deserve it (you're not a farmer yourself, are you? :cool: ), and regularly check-in to this thread on the status of this unfortunate situation, I urge you to non-passively inquire about your ticket via another method. It is readily apparent that the odds are against you if you simply assume the best and wait.
Thank you to the support team member who got to my ticket. Cheers to Bran, he is a good man, a good community manager and I want to believe that he's on our side.
Utmost gratitude to you sir, for working beyond your calling and helping to improve the efficacy of another team that you repeatedly state you don't share the duties of. Perhaps they should consider adding yooou to their paaayroll.
Good luck to anybody still in my situation, I know how you feel... if you haven't completely left the game yet like I was on the verge of considering. If you're unjustly banned for even longer than I have been, please hang in there, though nothing will happen to compensate for all the refined dilithium that you are missing out on.
Special thanks to DoffJobs channel for helping to keep my head cool when confronting the grim prospect of losing two years of effort, pleasant gaming, good memories of making friends with new people, for such an arbitrary reason. (All those STF runs killing scores of mindless death machines for Mk XII token drops, and in the end a mindless machine, nay, a dinky little word parser and an account database ban command extinguishes my Star Trek existence!)
I hope my sharing my summary and reaction towards this nearly month-long stressful anecdote is helpful to many parties, and in particular, I hope this post adds just a little bit more weight, as little value as just a single person's anecdote has, against future decisions about using certain blunt and brute protocols to deal with "problematic external entities". Please do not ever guesstimate a quantity of your own players to be an expendable collateral that is acceptable for achieving your goals, nor regard such a lethal, automated solution as "ingenuous" and ultimately time and money-saving, straight to the faces of those who were already frustrated and implicated for the wrongdoings of some shady virtual operation half a world away.
You WILL grossly underestimate the former, and you WILL overestimate the latter, particularly its negative effect on customer loyalty, and eventually nobody will be left to defend your brand and image.
I'd like to end my post with one more thing: I logged in and got another spam mail from a wretched, wretched goldfarmer with a different "company" name, this time an even more common, three-letter word. Utterly, utterly poetic. :eek:
I was auto-banned Sunday for talking about decimals while comparing Tholian swords with a fleet mate... As many have stated the message I sent did not go through and figured it was lag so I tested by saying something else which went through just fine... Upon repeating my original message I was disconnected and my account was banned.
I wont say the full line that I said in chat but I assure you it was less than 6 words and it had nothing to do with spam of any kind.
After being banned I almost immediately sent an email to customer service and filled out a ticket. It's day 3 for me... Waiting longer than this for simply talking about decimals seems rather absurd to me... But that's all anyone can do I guess...
I have no idea how CO banning works, so I couldn't say.
But I know from personal experience they are rather triggerhappy with the Report Player feature.
Someone takes your loot, Report Them.
You don't like someone, Report Them.
And this is the one that I experienced personally:
I was chatting to another player in the Noob Zone (and yes, it is a Noob Zone, the topics of discussion are beyond idiotic) about how computer gamers should eat healthy food.
After we finished our talk, I started mailing items to one of my alternate characters.
Only to have a 24hour silence message pop up!
And by the way, this muted my account in STO as well, I couldn't talk to anyone or mail items there either.
I asked Cryptic why my account was muted and they said something to the effect of someone had been abusing the report player function, therefore, they were cancelling the muting ahead of time.
But even though they're different issues, the fact remains that CO is listening to players and protecting them from the triggerhappy Reporters where STO is straight out ignoring what we are saying. :eek:
CO, STO, and NWN All share the same chat system. While on any of the games, you can talk to people on any game. Channels are universal as well.
So you'd think any change made on CO, chat wise, would apply to STO as well.
How it works is that if enough people use 'report spam' on you, OR *add you to their ignore list*, in a given timeframe, you get muted for 24 hours. Report spam ALSO automatically adds the player to your ignore list, so basically they're they same function (unless it was changed recently). Abuse on CO is *widespread*, with groups of people arranging 24 hour mutes on people they don't like or talking about things they don't like.
That is the first report I have ever heard of a 24 hour chat ban being removed. The typical response has been 'you're chat banned for 24 hours, suck it up.'
That is the first report I have ever heard of a 24 hour chat ban being removed. The typical response has been 'you're chat banned for 24 hours, suck it up.'
I had a 24 hour ban removed. I sent in a GM ticket and had it removed (it had been placed by someone I and another Fed defeated in Otha, who reported us I guess).
I had a 24 hour ban removed. I sent in a GM ticket and had it removed (it had been placed by someone I and another Fed defeated in Otha, who reported us I guess).
The way I understand it he would've had to get a bunch of his friends to join him in doing it. Not sure how many but I gather it's really not that many. Happens all the time in champs, been going on for nearly a year(at least, probably longer), and this is the first I've heard of them actually trying to do something about it...
It's pretty much the same thing as the auto chatbans here...a (partially) automated system designed to save them money by not having to have an actual person deal with it, that they basically ignored the adverse effects of because fixing it would've cost money.
Apparently, after months and months of it being a major problem, and much badgering from players about it, they're doing something about it. Huh.
so....did any one else get banned for an absurd amount of time or is it another issue ? Goggle tells me i've been chatbanned for....wait for it: 122 years.....thats 44,192 (and some change) days or over a million hours.....and i have no idea what i did !
I understand that Cryptic has to eradicate that ec-selling guys, but the means they utilize are... excessive. Few minutes ago I was talking with fleetmate who returned after long time away form game. He complained about receiving tons of spam mail. I wanted to ask him what spam was it, and typed in most popular's spam company name. About one second later I was "forcibly disconnected" and my account banned.
I mean, WHAT THE HELL?
Its ridiculous, I can't even log in to support page.
EDIT: Its 24 hours since I submitted a ticket. So far, no response of any kind. Moreover, my browser got stuck in redirect loop when trying to check my tickets, so the only way for Cryptic/PWE to contact me is to send message to the email associated with game account.
EDIT 2: 48 hours without response.
EDIT 3: 72 hours.
EDIT 4: 4 days.
EDIT 5: A bit over 96 hours, still no response of any kind, but my account has been reinstated. I'm not chat-muted too.
"don't bite the hand that feeds ya" LOL. no sorry to hear bout that, yet practically every "conspiracy" theory that exists , I believe is True in today's world.
I have no idea that there is such an auto-ban, even in a private channel.
I just go myself an auto-ban a few hours ago for cursing the gold-we-all-know-too-well-and-hate-to-our-guts-for-making-our-mail-filled-with-useless-junk-that-we-should-never-speak-off-you-know-who-spammer. This happened today when I realized my mails are gone and I thought the-one-we-should-never-call-by-name is responsible for hacking it. Little did I know that the mail disappearance is due to technical issues that Cryptic technical team is currently working hard on it. Unfortunately from what I've heard from my friends its a permanent-for-life-goodbye-STO kinda ban.
I am positive that the autoban is not meant for this, and this is not working as intended.
Please help in bringing my soul back and reviving my account since life without STO does not mean much for me.
I have submitted tickets, emailed tech-support, and if there is something else i need to do i will surely do it.
I just go myself an auto-ban a few hours ago for cursing the gold-we-all-know-too-well-and-hate-to-our-guts-for-making-our-mail-filled-with-useless-junk-that-we-should-never-speak-off-you-know-who-spammer. This happened today when I realized my mails are gone and I thought the-one-we-should-never-call-by-name is responsible for hacking it. Little did I know that the mail disappearance is due to technical issues that Cryptic technical team is currently working hard on it. Unfortunately from what I've heard from my friends its a permanent-for-life-goodbye-STO kinda ban.
I have submitted tickets, emailed tech-support, and if there is something else i need to do i will surely do it.
I was auto-banned Sunday for talking about decimals while comparing Tholian swords with a fleet mate... As many have stated the message I sent did not go through and figured it was lag so I tested by saying something else which went through just fine... Upon repeating my original message I was disconnected and my account was banned.
Well, I suggest that you send tweets to Branflakes and also persuade your fleetmates to speak in your defense in this thread. It seemed to work in my case.
Plus it will get crowded here since Cryptic seemingly moved to banning for using a combination of 3 letters.
"don't bite the hand that feeds ya" LOL. no sorry to hear bout that, yet practically every "conspiracy" theory that exists , I believe is True in today's world.
There is no conspiracy. Just Cryptic auto-banning random players in a futile attempt to curb gold spamming.
May 2013, automatic permanent ban for mentioning gold-seller sites pwebranflakes: this system is currently in place and working the way it should. moradum: I got banned for saying "I started my day with cutting off 3 MM off of the bottom of my cabinet"
That's pretty much the sentiment I've gotten from dealing with Customer Support.
That they don't actually acknowledge issues.
I've dealt with them for a long time on serious and non-critical issues and well, I get the impression they're not very good with customer service.
The serious issues have been ignored or they just didn't know how to solve them, the non-critical ones don't even get a proper response.
And those serious issues are similar to this one, what I call "gamebreaker".
It's something that adversely affects a gameplay feature to such an degree that the specific feature renders the game or asset unusable.
At best, it's only halfway functional.
I would say getting banned just for using chat definitely falls under that category!
And no, it's not really appropriate that we get branflakes or someone else to deal with this directly.
Also, what about people who aren't keen on social networking sites?
They're probably pretty rare these days, but I imagine there are people who still don't have facebook or twitter or whatever else there is accounts.
Are they supposed to sign up for something like this just to get customer service?
If I was the guy in charge of handling this problem, I'd get a punch of CS reps, say, okay, your job is to fix the autoban complaints and these only, you are to do nothing else but monitor and reactivate unjustly banned accounts.
And here's the thread, start engaging with the customers so they feel there is some human interaction, not automated software.
But realistically, I believe the only viable solution is just to get rid of it.
Be honest with me, how many of you are truly inconvenienced by someone spamming you about gold?
Ignore and Report will fix that pretty fast!
Whereas getting your account shutdown for a prolonged and indefinite period is much more of an inconvenience!
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
I will pass along your feedback, but this system is currently in place and working the way it should. If you see anyone trying to trick others, please report them to a GM immediately so an investigation take place and appropriate action taken.
Why not just auto-ban anyone accused of attempting such trickery, and call it "working as intended?" :rolleyes:
===post above is by aloishammer===
EDIT: Closed for necroing an old thread. Remember, if a thread has been inactive for 30 days, you should not post to it. Feel free to create a new thread on the subject if you would like to discuss further ~BranFlakes
Comments
Equally insane is banning on typing a simple word. Imagine people being auto-sent to prison, just because someone heard them say the word 'murder.' Without context, doing something as draconian as banning someone (which really should be an ultimum remedium only) is really true insanity. Banning someone should, at all time, be a human decision, made after careful deliberation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaORknS1Dk
I was ungracefully ban-hammer'd on May 26th by a mindless script ticking away on a line of code somewhere in a machine while trying to help my fleetmate understand, shun, and report gold seller botspam. Factoring in my awareness of the nightmarish ticket backlog caused by LoR, I felt sympathy for my fellow man and woman in the PWE Customer Support Crew and decided to wait patiently for my ticket to be processed naturally, running with only the most optimistic and logical assumptions.
After all, we do know that players are extremely valued and should never be punished or treated as expendable collateral in the addressing of another issue (read: gold farmer sting operation) that is beyond their control; this sole tenant is the basis of not just good customer service, but the very core of good game design itself, yes?
Thus, should that unfortunate situation arise, of course it would be logical to assume that they will take immediate steps to address the unjustly affected first. And also perhaps, if they could afford the initiative, make it protocol to place the affected on some kind of accelerated track, to stave off the feelings of victimization and bleeding customer loyalty as soon as possible. With these assumptions of how a good CS service is run, I kept my mouth shut, and I kindly waited. A daily ritual of seeing these messages in sequence began. "Retrieving list of characters ... -> Your account has been banned", and it would have helped a lot if they appended the words, "- for something you did not do" to that last part.
===
Today, I would like to report the insights that I have gained, and how wrong I was to make the assumptions above.
It took 23 days for my account to be reinstated but only thanks to Mr. Bran Flakes, who kindly helped to manage the ticket prioritization for my case. Unbanning was immediate and Mr. Flake's responses were awesome and friendly, after I realized that my patience towards the situation had been drained, and I called for his help. Just to try something different. I must express that I do not think I would have gotten help in due time without his bran-tervention. I must also point out that nearly everyone who posted in this thread has been attended to, since he does read this thread, but there are many more like me who haven't spoken up and have not been serviced. (In fact, this is my very first forum post.)
If you or a fleetmate that you know is still affected by this toxic decision to employ automatic, chat-based instant banning, do not deserve it (you're not a farmer yourself, are you? :cool: ), and regularly check-in to this thread on the status of this unfortunate situation, I urge you to non-passively inquire about your ticket via another method. It is readily apparent that the odds are against you if you simply assume the best and wait.
Thank you to the support team member who got to my ticket. Cheers to Bran, he is a good man, a good community manager and I want to believe that he's on our side.
Utmost gratitude to you sir, for working beyond your calling and helping to improve the efficacy of another team that you repeatedly state you don't share the duties of. Perhaps they should consider adding yooou to their paaayroll.
Good luck to anybody still in my situation, I know how you feel... if you haven't completely left the game yet like I was on the verge of considering. If you're unjustly banned for even longer than I have been, please hang in there, though nothing will happen to compensate for all the refined dilithium that you are missing out on.
Special thanks to DoffJobs channel for helping to keep my head cool when confronting the grim prospect of losing two years of effort, pleasant gaming, good memories of making friends with new people, for such an arbitrary reason. (All those STF runs killing scores of mindless death machines for Mk XII token drops, and in the end a mindless machine, nay, a dinky little word parser and an account database ban command extinguishes my Star Trek existence!)
I hope my sharing my summary and reaction towards this nearly month-long stressful anecdote is helpful to many parties, and in particular, I hope this post adds just a little bit more weight, as little value as just a single person's anecdote has, against future decisions about using certain blunt and brute protocols to deal with "problematic external entities". Please do not ever guesstimate a quantity of your own players to be an expendable collateral that is acceptable for achieving your goals, nor regard such a lethal, automated solution as "ingenuous" and ultimately time and money-saving, straight to the faces of those who were already frustrated and implicated for the wrongdoings of some shady virtual operation half a world away.
You WILL grossly underestimate the former, and you WILL overestimate the latter, particularly its negative effect on customer loyalty, and eventually nobody will be left to defend your brand and image.
I'd like to end my post with one more thing: I logged in and got another spam mail from a wretched, wretched goldfarmer with a different "company" name, this time an even more common, three-letter word. Utterly, utterly poetic. :eek:
I wont say the full line that I said in chat but I assure you it was less than 6 words and it had nothing to do with spam of any kind.
After being banned I almost immediately sent an email to customer service and filled out a ticket. It's day 3 for me... Waiting longer than this for simply talking about decimals seems rather absurd to me... But that's all anyone can do I guess...
THUNK THUNK THUNK!
I was hoping this issue had been attended to.
Apparently not.
Well, now I'm going back to not using ingame chat again.
By the way, I'm going to practice vocal cord removal surgery on the people who implemented this software.
Let's see how much they like it!
And they have to file a ticket with my receptionist to get their vocal cords back.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
CO, STO, and NWN All share the same chat system. While on any of the games, you can talk to people on any game. Channels are universal as well.
So you'd think any change made on CO, chat wise, would apply to STO as well.
How it works is that if enough people use 'report spam' on you, OR *add you to their ignore list*, in a given timeframe, you get muted for 24 hours. Report spam ALSO automatically adds the player to your ignore list, so basically they're they same function (unless it was changed recently). Abuse on CO is *widespread*, with groups of people arranging 24 hour mutes on people they don't like or talking about things they don't like.
That is the first report I have ever heard of a 24 hour chat ban being removed. The typical response has been 'you're chat banned for 24 hours, suck it up.'
I had a 24 hour ban removed. I sent in a GM ticket and had it removed (it had been placed by someone I and another Fed defeated in Otha, who reported us I guess).
The way I understand it he would've had to get a bunch of his friends to join him in doing it. Not sure how many but I gather it's really not that many. Happens all the time in champs, been going on for nearly a year(at least, probably longer), and this is the first I've heard of them actually trying to do something about it...
It's pretty much the same thing as the auto chatbans here...a (partially) automated system designed to save them money by not having to have an actual person deal with it, that they basically ignored the adverse effects of because fixing it would've cost money.
Apparently, after months and months of it being a major problem, and much badgering from players about it, they're doing something about it. Huh.
"don't bite the hand that feeds ya" LOL. no sorry to hear bout that, yet practically every "conspiracy" theory that exists , I believe is True in today's world.
I have no idea that there is such an auto-ban, even in a private channel.
I just go myself an auto-ban a few hours ago for cursing the gold-we-all-know-too-well-and-hate-to-our-guts-for-making-our-mail-filled-with-useless-junk-that-we-should-never-speak-off-you-know-who-spammer. This happened today when I realized my mails are gone and I thought the-one-we-should-never-call-by-name is responsible for hacking it. Little did I know that the mail disappearance is due to technical issues that Cryptic technical team is currently working hard on it. Unfortunately from what I've heard from my friends its a permanent-for-life-goodbye-STO kinda ban.
I am positive that the autoban is not meant for this, and this is not working as intended.
Please help in bringing my soul back and reviving my account since life without STO does not mean much for me.
I have submitted tickets, emailed tech-support, and if there is something else i need to do i will surely do it.
Well, I suggest that you send tweets to Branflakes and also persuade your fleetmates to speak in your defense in this thread. It seemed to work in my case.
Plus it will get crowded here since Cryptic seemingly moved to banning for using a combination of 3 letters.
There is no conspiracy. Just Cryptic auto-banning random players in a futile attempt to curb gold spamming.
pwebranflakes: this system is currently in place and working the way it should.
moradum: I got banned for saying "I started my day with cutting off 3 MM off of the bottom of my cabinet"
That they don't actually acknowledge issues.
I've dealt with them for a long time on serious and non-critical issues and well, I get the impression they're not very good with customer service.
The serious issues have been ignored or they just didn't know how to solve them, the non-critical ones don't even get a proper response.
And those serious issues are similar to this one, what I call "gamebreaker".
It's something that adversely affects a gameplay feature to such an degree that the specific feature renders the game or asset unusable.
At best, it's only halfway functional.
I would say getting banned just for using chat definitely falls under that category!
And no, it's not really appropriate that we get branflakes or someone else to deal with this directly.
Also, what about people who aren't keen on social networking sites?
They're probably pretty rare these days, but I imagine there are people who still don't have facebook or twitter or whatever else there is accounts.
Are they supposed to sign up for something like this just to get customer service?
If I was the guy in charge of handling this problem, I'd get a punch of CS reps, say, okay, your job is to fix the autoban complaints and these only, you are to do nothing else but monitor and reactivate unjustly banned accounts.
And here's the thread, start engaging with the customers so they feel there is some human interaction, not automated software.
But realistically, I believe the only viable solution is just to get rid of it.
Be honest with me, how many of you are truly inconvenienced by someone spamming you about gold?
Ignore and Report will fix that pretty fast!
Whereas getting your account shutdown for a prolonged and indefinite period is much more of an inconvenience!
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Why not just auto-ban anyone accused of attempting such trickery, and call it "working as intended?" :rolleyes:
===post above is by aloishammer===
EDIT: Closed for necroing an old thread. Remember, if a thread has been inactive for 30 days, you should not post to it. Feel free to create a new thread on the subject if you would like to discuss further