I’m not talking about any players specific bans but the whole system. How can a ban for a player who spams emojis in chat be the same as a player who is racist/homophobic/xenophobic etc.
I understand and appreciate the ability for the community to report anything that goes against the community rules but what I have seen recently is players being banned because they are unliked by a player or a guild and they receive numerous reports ending in a chat ban.
I think there needs to be a discussion about what and some sort of a solution which benefits everyone. Obviously the devs don’t have time to continually search through every report but i truly believe the game is losing good players ( who pay to play the game) because they are disliked by someone, reported and banned unjustly. ( also is there the possibility of alts continually reporting players )
While we all agree that this game had a strong community vibe I feel this is being lost. We need to feel like we are listened to, that our opinions matter whether it’s here or in global. Players shouldn’t be in fear of speaking because of the risk of being banned.
Let’s be clear - there is no room for racism, homophobia etc so players who talk like this in my opinion should receive a permanent chat ban or if it is sever-a ban from the game. Let’s not tolerate this behaviour. Show the community that they are valued. Of course this is just my opinion but it’s sad to see the game going the way it is because of a minority of players who get their kicks out of reporting unnecessary.
As someone who has been reported because some people didn’t “like” me… I’ve never gotten a chat ban. Not once in about 7 years of playing. False reporting doesn’t mean someone will get a chat ban at all. In fact, you can get in trouble if you false report often. Or that’s how it used to be. I haven’t been active in global for a while. Just a me thing, I haven’t been feeling social so not related to global and how the vibe is.
Chat bans can be for a day or two, longer, or forever. The devs seem to take into consideration what the reason for the chat ban is for the length of the chat ban. If that makes sense. They tend to give people a chance to redeem themselves as well. If the chat ban is for spamming emojis, learn from the first ban and don’t do it again. Easy. If it’s for racism or anything else that’s horrible, I’m hoping it can be a longer/perma ban. Not my call though.
I’m not a dev, I don’t work for the game. I’m just talking about personal experience over the years.
I can only speak for the German channel here. But at the moment many players are being banned and losing their honor rank because of heart emojis. Or because they make a few lol emojis behind a gag or something similar. For me, this is absolutely unacceptable. Either there really are a lot of players who always click the report button with their thumbs, or it’s a badly programmed A.I.
I think the only exception is on consoles, if you spam chat, the platform times you out for a limited time. But you would get timed out without any banned message description.
If you are banned from chat, these are all manually applied. I think I mention it elsewhere, but nothing has changed around bans, in years. No one new is handling them, policies have not changed, how they are reviewed and escalated remain the same.
If anyone doesn’t agree with their ban, you can submit a ban appeal ticket, and they will be reviewed. We will also explain why you were banned.. as I commonly see players assume they are banned for one thing, tell everyone that is the case, when actually they have been banned for something else.
If a heap of people report you, this alone will not get your account banned.
Exactly this.
Also, as described in the guidelines, the duration of your ban and potentially no warning, is dependent on your history of past bans as well as the severity of this instance.
If you have had a chat spam ban before, and it happens again, you’ll get another longer one and so on.
Again, if anyone doesn’t agree with their ban, you can submit a ban appeal ticket, and they will be reviewed.
A previous mod claimed that there were no auto-bans, and then proceeded to admit that there were after Krinklemess.
Following that, the same mod claimed that all bans would be seen/reviewed by all CX team members before being enforced
[quote=“Kafka, post:13, topic:80879”]
When a user is banned the whole CX team is notified so it can be checked, although usually everyone is notified before hand to sanity check it before the ban is placed to make sure mistakes aren’t made
[/quote]
Having been on the receiving end of unsubstantiated bans in the past for
“insults” (check my history of avoiding ad hominem),
“callouts" (a term implemented into the forum rules and/or used by previous mods to eliminate facts they disliked when a user showed the mods’ half-truths/inconsistencies, even through their own forum quotes),
and for bringing up the evidence with screenshots of said unfair bans, through the “we don’t discuss bans publicly” absurdity that was actually invented by said previous mods to keep on hiding when they abused their powers (please note how how “we don’t discuss bans” was never in the community guidelines, it was really just something they made up during their banning sprees, and it stuck since)
..I am hoping that Jeto can future -proof the processes and transparency (and a players’ ability to expose potential power abuse by future Mods), for when Jeto less involved in the forum in the future.
..or maybe we can keep hoping for Jeto to stay on as our Mod.
I’m only talking about game chat bans in this discussion.
We will continue not to discuss bans, outside of with the player who is affected.
Callouts will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. In my experience, callouts are if a player is calling out another player for X, Y, Z and not specific to interacting with the dev team.
And before it is mentioned, with Bramble and Kafka no longer being a part of the team, that has not affected how chat bans are applied, processed or reviewed - it’s just 2 less people people who are in that process.
Lastly again, if anyone ever has any issues, you can submit a ticket and I can escalate it above me.
This is of course the company’s prerogative, but this lack of transparency pretty much exclusively protects mods when/if they are abusing their power, unless I am missing something of course.
Again, nice in theory, but in the practice it can be (and has been) abused in the past, through the non-transparency that comes from the “we don’t discuss bans publicly”.
Having sent tickets that were responded by Sirrian and Andrew in the past with regards to the unfair bans, it was quite apparent that they do not have time/energy to read through the evidence provided (nor should they have to, since unfair bans can be avoided through increased transparency), so again that system may work in theory, but in the practice this place was a very different place before Jeto took over, and it was not because us forum members were all that different.
It is not unreasonable to hope for some transparency and future-proofing for whenever Jeto is not around, to try to avoid a repeat of the past.
Maybe it would help to have some examples on where the line in the sand gets drawn? Like, at which point using emojis goes from okay to not okay? I imagine that rule specifically just begs to create issues. For some 12 year old kid it’s perfectly normal to use emojis rather than letters to communicate, especially since the game presents them as something valuable not everyone has access to, more vintage gamers may feel rather annoyed about it.
Technical approach. The backend apparently has some mechanisms in place to detect chat messages it considers inappropriate. Some of this is visible to players after the fact (like censored swear words), some isn’t (like spamming). Would it be possible that whenever the server assumes an incoming chat message to be out of place that it first ask the game client to get confirmation whether the chat message really should be posted? The player would see some confirmation dialog like “hey, ‘poop’ is on our naughty list, you sure you want to post that?” or “hey, this is your tenth line of emojis in a row, you sure you want to annoy players with that?”. I get the impression that quite a few chat infringements are just due to players not realizing it’s an infringement, handling it this way would help.
Given the number of people auto-censored for naming the recent troop and boss Dago’Nath, as an example, players often don’t know something is “wrong” until after posting. I’m seen many messages posted by people using perfectly normal terms suddenly censored and them asking why they can’t say something.
Having the game detect the censored word and flag a warning before it posts saying that said word will be censored, would save an awful lot of accidental posting of things that aren’t allowed.
As for spamming emojis, I’d also like to have some sense of how many constitutes “spam”, as it seems to be a vague term that could mean wildly different things to different people. As has been pointed out, many younger people use vast amounts of emojis and little else, and would not consider it spam. Keeping it vague just makes it difficult not to fall afoul of the rule and get banned without any warning. Not fair.
I have also never been warned or banned. And I have no idea how many emojis you need for that. But it looks like it’s completely arbitrary. One of our guild members is currently affected. But it has happened more frequently in our guild in the last few months. I’ve been in the game for almost 8 years now, but this kind of inflation is quite noticeable. But I don’t know anything for sure.
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