Help needed: Toxic Squelch Abuse has strong impact on German Roleplaying Events

[Asarea]

Hi there!

 

At the moment the german roleplaying community (organized in the TH-RP.de forum & community) hosts the biggest roleplaying event of the year, the so-called "Imperial Festival Week" based on an imperial lore event*. This event features different themed evenings organized by roleplaying guilds for other roleplayers. For example an Imperial Propaganda play, a Sith reception or a prom night for Imperial soldiers.

 

These events usually take place in the Open World of the game (Kaas City) or in decorated strongholds open for visitors from all over the community. In short terms, it's the most important imperial roleplay event, to get in touch with new people and have fun together. We're hosting this event every autumn since 2014 and even if our roleplay community may be small compared to the english speaking roleplay community, those events are important to organizers and visitors and attract lots of players.

 

This year toxic behaviour of unknown players has a severe impact on our events: At the opening event (a military parade with speeches held by a Darth and a Colonel of the Imperial Army on Saturday 19th september 2020) both speakers got a 24h account wide silence ban while performing their speeches - so there must have been people reporting them repeatedly as spammers. Only those two got the ban, even if there were a lot of other people roleplaying and writing emotes around them. None of the speakers spammed their texts into the chat, they posted one text block in around 45 to 60 seconds and it was not repetitive spamming of the same lines, as for example credit sellers do.

 

The second event where these individuals tried to crash the evening was an Imperial Propaganda play held on Tuesday, 22nd September 2020; the main character of the theatre group was ban-silenced even before the play had started. All other actors left their guild to lessen their visibility in the search function and suffered no negative consequences.

The event could take place like planned, with the downside of the main person not being able to deliver the planned performance. On a special note: He got the ban just before the event started without even having performed anything that could explain some sort of automatic squelching, but it had to be abusive spam reports. Additionally the event took place in a private stronghold, just in case one would argue with "occupying" open game world space.

 

All organizers and participants of these events are well-known within our community so it's easy to find them via search even if they're not playing in the Open World or write anything in the chat. It's not acceptable that innocent people are banned for nothing then performing role play. And have to endure a punishment tailored for Goldsellers/Spambots.

 

Several people of the community tried to get help via support, but this ended without result - here's my part of the story:

• The german speaking ticket support told me to leave a thread in the german suggestion box part of the forum. I did so, but staff members seem to have abandoned the german part of the forum long ago so I don't expect help there anymore.
  
• The german speaking telephone support told me to leave a thread in the english part of the forum as the customer support agents are not able to do anything beyond checking whether someone is banned or not, and affirmatively do NOT have the measures to rectify bans caused by abuse of the spam squelch.
  

 

Eric Musco commented in 2016 on squelch abuse, promised these functions will be improved, and that action will be taken against abusers. Just about five days ago, Chris Schmidt wrote about actions against toxic behavior in the community, but it does seem at the moment that the squelch functionality has a severe potential for abuse and there are no sufficient precautions taken to punish abuse. Neither can a victim of such abuse receive fast help in cases of such harrassment (e.g local language Customer support not being able to do anything about this).

 

tl;dr:

Trolls are using the squelch system in abusive ways to crash open-for-all events of the german roleplaying community, please help!

 

As one of the admins of TH-RP.de (Tulak Hord Roleplaying Community) I'm writing on behalf of our players interested in and enjoying larger, open roleplaying events like the "Imperial Festival Week" - here some requests for improvement of the squelch system:

 

• Give your support staff more options to check the databases. It must be possible to identify abusive use of this system and discern whether spam reports on a specific player via this system are warranted or not.
  
• Don't allow bans to automatically take place due to few players hitting (aka spamming) the report button in short succession. The people that the system was created for are spamming content that will most likely cause many players to report them once or twice. High frequency reports by individual players should only cause a ban after a gamemaster / support agent has taken a look at the behaviour of the reported character, and should additionally cause an investigation for potential abuse.
  
• Rank spam reports from long-time accounts higher than reports from recently created accounts. Most trolls won't use their main account for their actions, in fear of facing repercussions by Bioware if they are found guilty of abusive behaviour.
  
• Have the system capture the next few chat text lines of the reported player when a report is submitted, and include this in the report. This would allow support to discern whether a spam report is warranted or not. It's hard to imagine that a roleplay fictional text is falling under the category of ingame behaviour, that the squelch system is targeted at.
  
• Please don't leave players suffering from this type of harassment alone. A 24 hours ban for nothing more than performing a role play event for other fellow players (and thus making it impossible to perform) and having absolutely no measures against this, is just not bearable and unfair. Stand up to Mr. Muscos and Mr. Schmidts promise to firmly act against these abusive individuals before they do even more damage to the RP community.
  

 

Thanks for reading - we're really looking forward for some help. I can provide timestamps and names of the affected characters from both events if this helps to identify the abusers. It's very dissapointing that just a very few people are able to crash the fun of many (the parade on Saturday was attended by app. 60 people) without any possibility to stop them on our side, or make sure they are swiftly handled by Bioware for what they are: toxic harassers.

 

Yours,

Csan

 

--------------------------------------

 

* Lore Reference:

Heroes of the Empire

The Sith-Empire would have collapsed millennia ago if its leaders did not comprehend how to motivate their people with more than just threats and intimidation. Sith Lords are generous to their subjects, showering common citizens with rich spoils of conquered worlds. Enslaved populations are parceled out to Imperial households as servants and laborers, ensuring lives of comfort and luxury for their masters.

Every equinox on Dromund Kaas heralds an indulgent week-long feast, reminding the people of what they fight for and stand to lose. Vaverone Zare, one of the most beguilingly beautiful Sith Lords in the Empire, is often seen leading decadent parades through the streets of Kaas City, encouraging citizens to join her. Whether people accept her invitations with fear or love is immaterial; what matters is that Sith and subject stand united."

(SWTOR Encyclopedia)

[DarkTergon]

Get the affected players to message eric or chris directly, and see if they can investigate why they were silenced, and who did it. They might be able to see a pattern of people, groups, etc.

Unfortunately trolls operate freely in this game, which is why the silence feature is good, but it does need to be monitored properly, and have a come back if used incorrectly.

Edited September 23, 2020 by DarkTergon

[Vyzra]

Like in the German thread, I am writing to support the suggestions.

Something has to be done against the few people, that just want to spoil the fun of many others.

[Drachodon]

So am I. Additional - serious Players have accounts that are regularly in use and several yeras old usually. Spammers accounts not. So it should not be too difficult, to check the age and activitay of an account automatically before banning.

 

There is a general thread about this problem also:

https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=983443

[Tharnaton]

This happened to some of our guidmembers while Roleplaying several times now, it would be good, if this problem could be solved in a better way, as it is now.

[DarkTergon]

So am I. Additional - serious Players have accounts that are regularly in use and several yeras old usually. Spammers accounts not. So it should not be too difficult, to check the age and activitay of an account automatically before banning.

 

There is a general thread about this problem also:

https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=983443

 

Long term players can be <redacted> too, the age of the account doesn't compute the mentality, unfortunately. We've seen plenty of long terms players trolling in chat, or pvp, etc.

[_Nyx_]

Hi

 

So I'm one of the german players mentioned in the OP that got squelched.

Just a fix summary, what when down yesterday: I prepared a theatrical play for a roleplay event that evenig and was standing with a guildmate in a stronghold. We were just texting a bit in our group chat and then 8:20 pm i got squelched out of nowhere (the play would've started at 8:30 pm). I didn't wrote anything in the general chat, nor in the say chat and was certainly not spamming anything, but yeah got reported for that because some trolls tried to sabotage this roleplay event and somehow knew it was my character, so it must have been planned because they know when to strike and who to target.

Of course i wrote a ticket and lucky for the whole event, a guildmate stepped in and performed instead of me.

 

Thing is, german support can't do anything and admits it, which is absolutely flabbergasting to me. They can't see who reported me and can't lift my ban. So all they're saying is: Sorry, the trolls won. This system needs to be reworked because you could seriously sabotage the whole rp community just by reporting someone of spamming or could troll enough other players who just want to advertise their guild and whatnot.

 

In my mind, this is in no doubt harassing other players and exploiting a weak system.

Sure, it's important to report the real spammers and credits sellers and have a functioning system for that, but right now it's not working and it's absolutely no fun if you did nothing wrong, just wanting to contribute to a fun rp event and having fun while doing so and getting squelched for no reason other than harassment and trolling.

[DarkTergon]

Hi

 

 

Thing is, german support can't do anything and admits it, which is absolutely flabbergasting to me. They can't see who reported me and can't lift my ban. So all they're saying is: Sorry, the trolls won. This system needs to be reworked because you could seriously sabotage the whole rp community just by reporting someone of spamming or could troll enough other players who just want to advertise their guild and whatnot.

 

.

 

Try sending a mail to support@swtor.com they are a higher level of support, and much more capable than the ticket system. If that fails, message eric or chris, or one of the community managers, till you get a response. They should be able to track it down, and sort it out. (hopefully)