One thing you need to look into is for some people, like myself, my monthly grant didn't show up as a monthly grant in my ledger. It shows it as an "In Game Purchase" instead. That may confuse some people who are simply looking at their ledger for the monthly grant, but because its labled wrong they aren't seeing it.

I did read, and I'll post your nonsense statement again to highlight how you have still failed to explain what your issue is. "How are spammers going to report players who report them?" Spammers aren't supposed to report people who report them for their spamming. But if they do, they will simply expose themselves to Bioware support for actually being spammers in the first place. But this thread, and Eric Musco's reply to this thread, has nothing to do with actual spammers complaining about getting squelched. Its about 100% innocent people being targeted for harassment, and one major form of that harassment is filing false spam reports against those innocent players to trigger the automatic squelching system. And, as it has been posted multiple times in this thread, innocent people who get squelched can file harassment tickets. Those tickets will trigger an investigation into both the person accused of spamming and the people who reported them for spamming. If the person who made the ticket was actually spamming, Bioware will consider additional punishment if they deem it necessary. If they were not spamming, or in any way violating the ToS, the people who reported them for spam will be warned and or punished for abusing the report spam system.

Learn to read maybe? Never said your stream is what got you squelched, or that you were squelched because of the guild you were in when you were squelched. But your claim that you go squelched because you "replied" to "whispers" from other people too fast is not true, and the archived video on your channel proves that. On 03/21 you were mass spamming whispers to, not reply to whispers from, people from a certain guild you were not a member of. A guild who had banned you and whose members want nothing to do with you. You had the entire guild pulled up via /who and you went through the list, whispering as many of them as possible with a link to your twitch stream. Which is both spam and advertising, making any squelch you received deserved under the ToS. I didn't address it because it makes no sense. The spammers don't get to report anyone, because if they were actually spamming, they deserve whatever punishment they receive. Now, if someone is unfairly squelched when they were not actually spamming, that issue has been clearly addressed in this thread. If you were not actually spamming, but get squelched, per EA Customer Relations you are to file an in game ticket for harassment. When you file that ticket, you provide them with as many details as possible. A ticket should look something like this: "On ThisDate I was improperly squelched at approximately ThisTime. Please review my chat log to see that I was not spamming or breaking any other policy under the ToS at or before the time I was squelched. Since I was not in any violation of the ToS when I was squelched, that means another player or players who reported me were abusing the Report Spam feature and reporting someone who was not actually breaking the rules. Please review the logs to see who reported me, after verifying I was not actually breaking the rules, and take appropriate action against the player or players who filed the false reports against me." When the ToS enforcement team reviews that ticket, the first thing they will do is look at the chat logs of the person who made the ticket. If that person was actually breaking the rules, they will be opening themselves up for additional possible action against them. If and only if they were not breaking the rules will Bioware then look at who reported them for spam in the first place and take appropriate action as necessary.

A quick look at the link to your twitch stream, that you have included in your own signature, shows you actually spamming. Archived video from March 21st. You have an entire guild pulled up with /who, a guild you were previously banned from and whose members want nothing to do with you, and you are sitting there, going through the list of members, sending everyone on the list whispers with links to your twitch stream. Based on that video evidence, you were in fact spamming, and advertising as well. So I'm not sure why you are surprised by what happened.

Actually, they do. If someone is reported for spam enough times, about a dozen, the system automatically squelches them. Its a completely automated system. There is zero oversight or action on behalf of Bioware unless the person getting squelched files a complaint.

First, to give people who will want to respond to this thread, please see this thread for a little context and a direct response from Eric Musco. The Report Spam feature in game is broken in its current state. No one should be capable of reporting another player for spam without ever actually seeing that player post something in chat. But as it stands, you can just /who a player or guild name and report any name you see for spam. If you are reported enough times, exact number is unknown but its believed to be around a dozen, you can't post in chat for 24 hours across your entire legacy. My suggestion is simply changing the system to function how it should have been set up from the start. Meaning that there should be absolutely no option to report a player for spam by right clicking their name unless you are right clicking on that name in the chat box. That's because, if you never witnessed that person posting something in chat, its simply not possible for someone's spam report to be valid. To further improve this system, beyond restricting the Report Spam option to the chat box only, is to limit a player's ability to report another player for spam to a reasonable time frame. If you see someone truly spamming in chat, you should not be able to report that person for the spam more than once every few minutes. 5 minutes would be my recommendation. If that person truly is spamming, other players can report them for spam as well and allow the properly revamped squelching system do its job. The reason why this change is needed is because under the current system a single person can report another player for spam a dozen times in less than a minute and trigger that broken currently broken squelching system all their own. By limiting a player's ability to Report Spam another player to once every few minutes, you prevent one player from being able to silence people all on their own. When they try to report the same person for spam more than the once every 5 minutes, they can be prompted with a message like "We have already received your previous report concerning this player's potential spamming. Please wait 5:00 minutes before reporting this player again. You apply this legacy wide so the player can't simply switch characters in order to dodge that CD on the reporting. Implementing these two reasonable and necessary changes will eliminate the majority of the abuse the affected players are suffering from.

That was one of the suggestions I made to the gentleman I spoke to today from Customer Relations, and that he is passing on to the development team. To fix things so you can not report someone for spam without actually witnessing that person posting something in chat. As it stands, you can just /who and go down the list reporting anyone and everyone for spam. Its the main reason why the abuse is so out of control. So hopefully we will see some sort of fix for this soon.

Yes, shame on you for trying to defend people who are making the game unplayable for over 200 people. Eric Musco didn't respond to this thread the way he did because we're making it up. I also personally received a phone call this morning from someone in EA Customer Relations, not just the normal Bioware phone support, after trading emails with him last week. I have no doubt Eric Musco's post is in relation to that escalated investigation that has now been underway since the end of last week. Community managers don't make public posts warning all users that a serious rules violation has occurred, and will not be tolerated, if the people filing the complaints were liars. They would have shut down the thread and taken action against all of us reporting the harassment. But instead they fired a warning shot at anyone who thinks they can abuse the system to stifle other players or guilds. I'd link the website of the guild guilty of the harassment, but I know you'd instantly report the post in order to silence me. The front page of their website alone has more than enough proof on it to completely justify their guild, and everyone of their alt guilds, be erased from the server. Its full of pictures insulting and mocking our members, including proof they have someone inside our guild monitoring and reporting on our guild chat, and has a shoutbox full of constant celebration over their successful harassment of our guild.

This pretty much hits the nail right on the head. I think part of the problem with the people freaking out over this is they have never experienced the constant and widespread abuse that those of us trying to draw attention to this issue are suffering from. This isn't some one off case of one or two people getting squelched after some dumb argument in gen chat. There are people on our server, many of them members or alts of members of a certain guild, who simply do a /who of our guild name, or the names of people they know are officers within our guild, and mass report them for spam on a daily basis. Day after day, after day, after day, going on for more than a month now, people getting squelched over and over again to prevent them from ever speaking in any chat channel. As soon as the 24 hour squelch is up, they simply mass report again to trigger another 24 hours of being squelched. Throughout this entire thread people keep trying to claim we are making it up, that we are really just spamming and are crying about suffering because of it. But its a little hard to spam anything when you can never actually post in any chat channel, public or private, because you get squelched every 24 hours like clockwork. Then there is the fact that the big squelch waves, when they hit as many members as possible and not just leadership, always happen while we are in the middle of trying to do things in games like run Ops or conquest groups. When I got squelched on Thursday, I was in a TFB Op with 7 other guild members. All of a sudden, halfway through the Op, all 8 of us ended up squelched. And at that same exact time, members of the guild griefing us zoned into TFB to mock us in the Ops gen chat. And just last night, we pulled ahead for 1st on the Conquest leaderboard, as we were running multiple groups through KP and EC lockouts, and every member of our guild who was online at the time ended up squelched. Even people who had been in the guild for a couple of days, and people who only get a chance to play a few hours each week on the weekends, everyone got squelched in order to limit our ability to use our guild chat to keep forming and reforming out groups for farming content. And the result was exactly what the griefers were going for, they were able to pass us for the lead again because they crippled our ability to function as a guild. So what's going on here is on such a massive scale that there is no way any GM would be able to claim innocence or ignorance of the behavior.

*delete

But the most important thing of all, is those of us suffering from this abuse know for a fact the abuse is being coordinated between members of the guild in question via in game chat. We've seen it first hand, and is easily verifiable by the team at Bioware that handles ToS violations. Everything someone types into chat, no matter if its a public chat channel or private whisper, the people at Bioware can see it. Not only that, but that GM of that guild is one of the people actively participating in the abuse. So there is no need for widespread fear of GMs being held accountable for a single rogue player who breaks the rules while no one else in the guild knows about it. That's simply not the case in this situation. And I have it direct from EA Customer Relations that this situation is being dealt with on an escalating punishment system. Warnings>short term bans>long term bans>perma ban with account deletion. But, like with any escalating punishment system, more severe punishments may be handed out for this current situation if the guilty parties have previous warnings and bans on their accounts already for prior rule breaking. That's true for a guild as a whole too, if a whole guild was issued a warning for a major rule violation in the past, they can find their guild disbanded.

We can debate hypotheticals all day, and it will get us nowhere. And don't hold your breath for Bioware, EA or any other developer to ever disclose exactly what action they will take and when in regards to rule breaking. While its important for policies to be clear as to what behavior will and will not be tolerated, punishments for breaking said policies are always very broad because the punishment each person receives can vary in severity based on whether or not a person has broken the rules in the past. Even minor past infractions, that resulted in nothing more than a warning, can be taken into consideration for future punishments for future rule breaking. Again, trying to stay away from hypotheticals, when there is widespread rule breaking within a guild, its nearly impossible for people not directly involved in the rule breaking to claim ignorance of the behavior. While they may have not been breaking the rules, it will be hard for them to claim they never once saw other members discussing the rule breaking via chat, or overheard people talking about the rule breaking via the guild used VOIP, or never suspected rule breaking when all of a sudden guild members down content they were never geared for in the first place, or the G Bank all of sudden explodes from millions of credits to billions of credits. So while there may be guild members who never actually break the rules themselves, its difficult in the eyes of the developer for them to claim complete ignorance to the behavior. Having any such knowledge of the behavior, and failing to report it and failing to remove themselves from the guild, makes them guilty by voluntary association. In the rare, and verifiable, cases where action has been taken against entire guilds in the past in various games, its typically only people directly involved in the rule breaking, and guild leadership, that find their accounts banned for any significant amount of time. Those members who may or may not have known about the rule breaking face nothing more serious than finding themselves in need of a new guild. And yes, that is an entirely reasonable thing for a developer to do, to disband a guild that was guilty large scale ToS violations. Any issues like loss of credits or items put into the G Bank by those other players who weren't breaking the rules are irrelavent. As soon as they deposited those credits or items in the bank, they renounced all claim of ownership to them. Also, the hypotheticals like you are proposing are also why games have appeals processes in place. As it stands, you and other people posting in this thread are worried that Bioware will start actually enforcing the rules already in place because you may get caught up in such nonsense as false positives. Abusing the Report Spam feature has always been against the rules, but after weeks and weeks for forum posts, phone calls, emails and tickets, Bioware and EA are finally catching on to the fact that there is widespread abuse going on. With the guilty parties actively bragging about their rule breaking in their recruitment posts in gen chat, its hard for anyone in those guilds to claim they don't know anything about the abuse.

I missed nothing, but you certainly did. You claim that reporting credit spammers "has not done anything already", which is simply not true. If enough players report the same character for spamming, that entire account, legacy wide, gets squelched for 24 hours. Now, if by "has not done anything already." you mean that it has not actually stopped credit spammers as a whole, you're right. But wrong to think that they would ever be able to stop them completely. They plague every MMO in existence and will never be stopped completely. But refusing to report their spam simply because you don't feel the result is significant enough is the worst kind of logic imaginable. Every account credit spammers use that gets squelched makes their lives that much more difficult in order to spread their spam. Squelching is legacy wide, so simply making a new character isn't enough to get around the squelch. As to what you missed in my post, you can not and will not ever be punished under a false positive for properly reporting actual spam. Credit spam is always spam, regardless of its frequency, because its content is still against the ToS. The issue with the squelching system is its automatic, with no actual review by a live person, that's why people who are not spamming are getting squelched. But when those of us who are being improperly squelched file a harassment complaint over the squelching, those reports are being reviewed by a live person. They take a look at the chat logs of the person who was squelched during the time period leading up to them being squelched. If and only if they do not see that the person was not actually spamming do they review the people who reported them for spam in the first place. If that person was not actually spamming, then every person who did report them for spam 100% deserves whatever warning or punishments are issued because they abused the system by reporting someone who wasn't actually breaking the rules. None of this is assumptions either, I've spoken directly to customer relations about this issue. And no, I don't me the people at the Bioware support phone line. The tickets I filed about being improperly squelched were investigated and they found I really was being harassed. So someone from EA Customer Relations reached out to me to conduct a phone interview, and I spent over an hour with him on the phone discussing all of this. Everything I have related to you about how the system works and how you can't and won't be punished for reporting real spam comes directly from Customer Relations and the team that investigates ToS violations. What he is referring to, but doesn't make clear in his post, is taking action against guilds and guild leadership when harassment is coordinated between members via in game guild chat. For example, when they investigate abuse of the report spam feature, and the chat logs of the people abusing it shows those people talking about it via guild chat, they expect guild leadership to take appropriate action to make sure their members aren't breaking the rules like that. Its no different than the times in SWtOR and other MMOs where entire guilds are issued various bans and guilds disbanded as a whole because a group of guild members were hacking or abusing exploits. Its all against the rules and if guilds coordinate that rule breaking with in game, the guild as a whole can be held responsible for it. Innocent players not involved with the rule breaking, but choose to stay in a guild they know is openly breaking the rules, must accept some measure of responsibility for tolerating that rule breaking. They should be leaving the guild on their own at the very least, and technically, in the eyes of Bioware/EA, they should be reporting their fellow guildmates for the rules breaking in the first place.

That's because too many people think the same way you do, that reporting them just isn't worth it. As a result, not enough people report them for the automatic squelching to get triggered. While they have never provided the exact number, based on my conversations with EA Customer Relations, it takes about 10-15 reports within a short period of time to trigger the automatic squelching. So if you and everyone else don't bother to report the credit spammers, because you assume nothing will happen, they will never get squelched. You also would never be punished for a false positive for reporting a credit spammer because the credit spammer would have to file a ticket claiming they were improperly squelched, and a quick review of their chat log would show they were in fact spamming and worth of the report.

Every single MMO works that exact same way. For a tank to all of a sudden lose the access to the basic things that keep them alive just because they have to channel a spell would make tanks useless.