Crime & Punishment. Why have GM's that are unable or unwilling to suspend accounts?

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Originally Posted by Esrain

If there crime but no punishment, what's preventing criminals from doing crime in the first place?

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Unless they verbally harassed you, called you out on your numbers or otherwise talked amongst themselves on another channel about you that the GM can check there is nothing the GM's can do. Kicking for differences in playstyle (which is exceptionally broad but that was the intent) is a safety zone given to parties who don't like the way another player is performing, acting, or really anything else D: doesn't make it right but that is the reality of it.
Also even if GM's did take action they are rule bound not to tell you what, if any, their actions were against the offending parties. That is just a part of the guidelines they follow. Never ever expect to be told if they took action or what those actions were. Sorry you had a bad day :/

Those players are idiots for sure, I wish GMs would punish them badly but most likely they don't do anything at all!...

I've been vote kicked before for no apparent reason other that they were a pre-made party which has total control of whom is kicked or not, maybe they wanted a friend to join at the last boss or they were "teaching" the new member of their FC, whatever the reason there are times when it's just unfair!...

Sadly, the only thing to do is to black-list them and hope to never have to play with them again!...

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Originally Posted by ThirdKeyOfSun

Also even if GM's did take action they are rule bound not to tell you what, if any, their actions were against the offending parties. That is just a part of the guidelines they follow. Never ever expect to be told if they took action or what those actions were. Sorry you had a bad day :/

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You will almost never be told by a GM what action they took or if they will take any. Likely this is for the sake of privacy for all parties involved, and also so GMs won't get bombarded by demands from players who know a lot about what other GMs did to discipline others. The GM could have given the people OP met a temporary ban and he'd never know about it unless those players told OP. And if they did that is considered harrassment and is a punishable offence, likely offenders are warned about this.

So in short, for various reasons, it is incredibly unlikely for anyone reporting anything to hear what punishment took place from a reliable source.

Unless there is chat log evidence of harassment, the GMs cannot just dish out punishment. You need evidence before you can punish someone; without evidence, there is no proof of anything “wrong” happening. And it sucks, but you can try to see it this way: maybe you ended up dodging a bullet in the end. The one time I was vote dismissed in this game was after a very nasty confrontation with a tank about standing in things/not dodging mechanics (I was the healer, and they were making my job nigh impossible short of spamming Cure II on them), and I was glad to be dismissed from that group (I was going to leave it anyways; would have rather eaten the penalty). Try to think of it that way. Try not to give those three another thought.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

I am aware of this, while it doesn't apply in this case, in the past when I've reported someone i know on my own server, i'd know if nothing was done to them, and I'd still see them around as if nothing happened.

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That doesn't mean a GM did nothing. They do give warnings. Bans only happen if the offence is severe or if the player is a repeat offender of something more minor.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

If you put it that way, I think i'll agree with you that it could have been a good thing that I got out of the group. They were performing poorly anyway.
About the chat log, there is always a server side chat log available, that's why they ask for timestamps and they can even check actions.
However, the reason I posted this in general, despite my issue today, is to raise awareness or have a general talk of how GMs often cannot or do not want to suspend accounts. (abuse, harassment, teleporting)

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I agree that there are issues of the GMs dismissing rampant cheating, especially when it comes to things like botting (PvP is a nightmare, and I am aware of a few crafting/gathering bots on my server that have been reported multiple times, and nothing has been done about them because they’re still there botting away all day). I agree that there are also a lot of issues with the kinds of evidence GMs will accept when reporting players (e.g., it has to all be in-game; they won’t accept video evidence of botting players, etc.).

It could very well be that there was FC chat evidence (or LS chat evidence) of the three planning to kick you to bring in a friend, or what have you. And the GMs will see that, when they go back and investigate. They just cannot tell you of any action, and trust me, it sucks thinking the harassers or cheaters got off scot-free. But all it takes is more reports of similar actions, and the GMs will move from warnings to suspensions to banning. There’s just no outward way of knowing, unless you track their Lodestones and notice: “It...doesn’t seem like they’ve logged in in about a month”, or they come out and say they were banned on some form of social media.

Personally, I go back and forth on the hush-hush way GMs won’t tell you if they took action or not. I understand why they do it, but I also understand how crappy it feels to think your complaints fall on deaf ears.

I just try not to waste too much time on people like the three you met. They put me in a foul mood, and I’d rather not let them ruin the time I get to play. It’s hard sometimes, but if you can do it, it makes things so much easier.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

My opinion right now is that the main problem with the reporting feature is the amount of loopholes when it comes to being unable to suspend bad players

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GMs need evidence. For all you know absolutely nothing in the chat logs referred to kicking you because it was instead discussed in voice chat, which SE have no access to.

Also while kicking you for seemingly no reason is definitely a crappy move by them, it's not exactly a horrible offence. They didn't insult you, they didn't try to trick you into getting ddosed by asking you to copy paste a link, they didn't tell lies about you to your fc mates behind your back. You were only removed from an instance. It's crap but it's hardly on the spectrum of criminal.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

It is okay to abuse the Ungarmax Limit Break bug if you didn't know it was a bug but thought it was feature."

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Sometimes it's unclear if something is a bug, a feature or unintended use. An experienced raider would know that the Ungarmax LB was definitely not intended and most likely a bug, but a newer player might just think it's a cool and useful tool they figured out.

Whereas something like players somehow figuring out how to make an arena you should be able to fall off of have invisible walls, thus becoming unable to fall off, would obviously appear to be a bug to most players as it's literally breaking the instance.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Giving feedback is the only way Square Enix knows what it's doing wrong and unless you speak up things will not change for the better.

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While I agree with this, if this exact thing happened in WoW you would have had literally the same result. Even though Blizzard has a much larger and more efficient support team.

Simply put, your issue is very minor and without hard evidence that it happened as a result of harassment, no GM in any game can do anything about it.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Let's say they were using voice chat, so nothing was written, it would still fall under abusing the vote kick for no reason.

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No it wouldn't. If players absolutely had to provide a reason for kicking then there would be a textbox or a drop-down menu for that in the vote kick window, and you wouldn't be able to kick unless a reason was given. But no such things exist, so being given a reason isn't mandatory.

By your logic a group who removes a bad player without stating why in-game is abusing the system. That doesn't make sense. That is not how this works.

Just because more than a handful of people are experiencing something doesn't make it a major issue. It just means a lot of players don't understand when something can be easily classified as harassment or not.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Point is, it is not a minor issue, it is a widespread issue. And unless changes are done, it will continue being an issue.

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Not to be mean about this but frankly SE have better things to be doing than forcing players to provide reasons for kicking or punishing those who don't.

If your thread was initially about botting and such the like, then fine you'd have a point but that was added as an afterthought. Your focus has been the salt over quietly getting kicked.

It's not game breaking and most players can just shrug it off quickly and move on. About time you do too, or make a post targetted at more serious issues like bots not being dealt with.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

I've reported them in-game and got a generic response from the support desk.[

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What did the response say?

Well, it has been years and it's not like they don't know the vote dismiss window doesn't show all the valid reasons to kick someone, the lead GM already explained before the reason they don't add all the valid reasons to vote dismiss someone is because it would encourage people to seek loopholes, and not everything is black or white.

Instead, they keep the clear-cut cases in the vote dismiss window and the grey area ones are reviewed case by case.

Either way, if they added a "different playstyles" option to the window nothing would change about your case.

I have been playing since launch and never been booted randomly so I wouldnt call it a widespread problem. Maybe your dps was much lower then you thought and they wanted someone else.

If there was a 'different playstyle' choice in the window you wouldn't know if that's what they picked, also until now the topic wasn't "I wasted my time reporting these players", don't change goalposts, your last few posts have been arguing about seeking punishments despite already being told there are many reasons not stated in the vote dismiss window.

Just let it go, move on with your life, the chance of this happening again is very slim, this is not as widespread as you think.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Just let it go, move on with your life, the chance of this happening again is very slim, this is not as widespread as you think.

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This really is the best thing you can do, OP. Vote Kick Abuse is not as widespread as you think it may be, especially if this is the first time it’s ever happened to you. I’ve played this game since November 2015, and only been kicked once. And, like I told you, it was a blessing, and saved me a 30-minute penalty.

Never got kicked before and the only time I remembering vote dismissing someone was a healer ast who was in the vault with a ilvl55 weapon... Managed to clear through to the last boss of the vault but the heals were not enough to save anyone included the tank who rotated CDs and used living dead. In my opinion bringing a ilvl55 wep into late HW dungeons is a little too much when ironworks itself is 120...

I think they should take the Overwatch approach if action is taken you get a notice that your report resulted in some form on action being taken. For any report, be bots, cheating etc . . .

I've been playing the game for over 2 years and I've only been kicked once before, randomly in frontlines. I guess someone thought I was a bot? I was staying with the group and fighting so idk. All that you do when stuff like that happens though is keep going. If they weren't harassing you or slandering you there's not really anything the gm can do about it.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

...players who choose to abuse the system since it would be hard to prove.

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People are under absolutely zero obligation to play with you, and if the majority of the party agree that you should be removed, then they can do so if they feel you do not fit with how they want to play. This is how the GMs have responded to every single question about vote dismissing. It is not abuse. It is working as intended.

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we have another ignorant person who completely dismisses the power of google search.

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You don't seem to know how google search works, so I don't think you should be flinging the word ignorant around.

Searching for ffxiv vote dismiss (no quotes) brings up every single website with those three words appearing together for any reason, including those talking about the feature, asking how it works, or times that it is appropriate, or threads just like this one. Even so, it only returns 62,000 results.

ffxiv "Vote kicked" brings up 1,650 results.
ffxiv "vote dismiss" brings up 937.
ffxiv "vote dismissed" brings up 505.
ffxiv "kicked from party" returns 516.
ffxiv "dismissed" brings up the most, at 135,000, and still contains results that aren't specifically about people being vote kicked from duties, such as pet dismissal, FC dismissal, etc.

Given FFXIV has passed 10 million players in total (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fi.../1100-6452413/) and had around 826,000 active players at the end of January per Lucky Bancho's unofficial census (see https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...a_101/dnsgiki/)

....yeah. You ain't convincing me or anybody that it's as big a problem as you wish it was.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Again we have another ignorant person who completely dismisses the power of google search.
"FFXIV vote dismiss" You're welcome.

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I'm sorry, but if you are going to call them ignorant you might want to rethink your idea that google search of more anecdotal experiences actually proves this happens often because that would be ignorant.

When people explain these personal experiences it is from a biased point of view about an event and therefore may be missing information since it is one sided, faulty due to bias, and ruled by emotion and not logic and/or facts.

There is absolutely no way for you to prove this happens frequently or determine the % of the player base who has had this happen to them. Only SE would be able to investigate since they have all the data on every vote kick ever initiated and chat logs. Even then outside chat/voice programs may make even their conclusion not 100% accurate.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Again we have another ignorant person who completely dismisses the power of google search.
"FFXIV vote dismiss" You're welcome.

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Just because it happens here and there doesn't mean it happens on a daily basis.
How many dungeons you did and how many abusive kick you got?

While sort of off topic, not going to lie I have started vote kicks if I happen to get a three lala's in a the group in hopes of getting a fourth. Even put that as the reason for the vote, scary thing is a decent number of them pass which is frightening.

Lol GM's step up your game. Unless not lala enough falls under the difference of play style, if so carry on GM's.

Adding a difference of playstyle option will do nothing as you cant see the reason why you were kicked. Gms as so many have stated wont take action unless they find something and wont tell you if they take action, leading you right back to where you are now.

I've ran over 1500-2000 dungeons in my time playing and not once was I vote kicked, I think you are not telling the true story, like at all.

Been here since 2.0 and only been vote kicked once.
Was tanking with a bad MH (I honestly didn't know it was low ilvl, no tank MH's had dropped, didn't even cross my mind as everything else had dropped).
At the final boss they all spoke up at once and promptly kicked me, despite no aggro/health issues. Don't think I should have been kicked, but had they not said anything, I might have continued not to notice, so partially my fault.

Anyway, I don't know if I'd say it's common, just very loud players when it happens, because it can on occasion be for no reason.
It is what it is, just keep moving on.

Honestly I don't have much faith in the GM staff as far as disciplining other players for wrong behavior. I had a situation on another server where I had to report someone nine times (NINE TIMES) for harassment and stalking, and after a couple months and nine reports later, they were still following me around every zone, spamming me with /tells (of a sexual nature), waiting outside my apartment, etc. nearly every day. Nothing happened to this guy. How do I know? He was doing it for months and after many reports it was clear not a single GM talked to him or else he would have stopped. That or he got a temp ban and just didn't care and felt it was worth it to continue.

GMs define stalking as a clear intent to cross zone lines to follow you. I had numerous friends submit tickets on my behalf, and even offer to talk to GMs when I submitted mine and not one of them cared. I always got "that's not necessary to talk to them"... you know, talking to witnesses is never necessary apparently.

Long story short? Yeah, our GM staff is mostly paid to do nothing apparently. Sure, they are nice every time I have to submit a ticket. But when you have a clear case of harassment and stalking, and blatant violation of terms of service go unchecked for months on end you start to wonder what they actually do with their time. As a player I shouldn't have to be forced to sit in my apartment 24/7 when not in queue because the GM staff can't be bothered to moderate the game for which they are paid to do so, especially when it's so blatantly obvious. I've also reported obvious botters and seen those characters still botting days or weeks later. The GM staff in this game just doesn't care. At least on the NA side. I've heard stories of Korean GMs who take harassment and blatant rules violations very seriously and will outright ban and publicly shame people who do so. I'm all for that type of enforcement.

But yeah, our GM staff doesn't seem to actually enforce the rules... unless you're trying to make profit (real money) off the game, then they care. C'est la vie.

This game has the worst GMs and customer support that you will ever come across in an MMO, and I hope to hell and back you'll never ever have to have anything to do with reporting/having your issue resolved because these victim blaming and victim isolating folks cannot and will not do their job of managing a community and making sure LOGICAL and FAIR actions are taken against those who abuse the system or make the players want to quit both the game and their lives. Rant over.

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Originally Posted by ThirdKeyOfSun

Also even if GM's did take action they are rule bound not to tell you what, if any, their actions were against the offending parties. That is just a part of the guidelines they follow. Never ever expect to be told if they took action or what those actions were. Sorry you had a bad day :/

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Completely true.

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Originally Posted by ThirdKeyOfSun

Unless they verbally harassed you, called you out on your numbers or otherwise talked amongst themselves on another channel about you that the GM can check there is nothing the GM's can do. Kicking for differences in playstyle (which is exceptionally broad but that was the intent) is a safety zone given to parties who don't like the way another player is performing, acting, or really anything else D: doesn't make it right but that is the reality of it.

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Completely false. There are a lot of forms of harassment, they don't need to insult you to be warned or banned. If an individual say constantly early pulls hunts/puts them behind rocks so that they go LoS, repeteadly kicks others in dungeons for no reason or does some sort of clear griefing just for the sake of it I can assure you that person is gonna be having a few words with a GM.

This "differences in play-style" BS needs to end. While I've never experienced it myself, it fosters a negative mentality which is very apparent on the forums. At minimum people need to see who kicked them from the party. Also, if "differences in play-style" is truly a valid reason.... add it to the list and make it official.

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Originally Posted by Sesera

Just because it happens here and there doesn't mean it happens on a daily basis.
How many dungeons you did and how many abusive kick you got?

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He's not completely wrong. Some people make a sport out of kicking others and they end up getting warned by a GM. If for whatever reason, you are sporadically kicked out from a dungeon because of "different game style reasons" or because someone has a bad day, even if you report them it will hardly lead to anything, but if somebody repeteadly does it and starts amassing reports, then yeah, they are bound to meet with a GM soon. I've only come across a couple or 3 times were I was kicked from a dungeon for literally no reason, and every single damn time they were premades from the same server and FC. I reported all of them. If they just had a "douche moment" I really don't care, I can take the kick and move on (and SE will do nothing about it, I'm fine with this), but whenever this happened I thought myself if there's even the slightest chance these people are going full rampage griefing others just like they did with me now, it's my obligation to let SE know these guys might be toxic, so to hell with them if it's the latter.

From all the GMs I've talked to about the botting problem on my server, it seems they don't actually have the authority to ban cheaters that are hacking/botting/exploiting, and instead relay a message to their so-called " action team" (Inaction team would be more appropriate at this point) that supposedly does an investigation using "special tools" (The only "tools" you need to identify the average botter/hacker are your eyes) before deciding whether or not to issue a ban.

Why this is the case, I'll never know, because every other MMO I've played gave GMs the authority to be judge/jury for everything. When I played WoW, the bots would get ban-hammered within a day of mr reporting them, and I'd get an actual response from the ones who did it, whereas I sit around with my fingers crossed wondering if they even read my reports here.

A P2P MMO really has no business allowing the same players to persist with this same behavior that blatantly violates the ToS for years on end. On Cactaur, it's gotten so bad that it's virtually impossible to profit off of aethersands/infusions due to a bot-farming FC of six+ active players constantly farming them and aggressively undercutting anyone who tries to compete with them.

I will say, though, that they're not entirely inept, because one was nice enough to forcefully change the names of someone's retainers after they started naming them after me in an attempt to taunt me/confuse others (Presumably because I was repeatedly undercutting them as a silent protest of their bot farming).

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Originally Posted by Gallus

Snip.

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I think you missed the point here

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Just let it go, move on with your life, the chance of this happening again is very slim, this is not as widespread as you think.

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OP answer

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Again we have another ignorant person who completely dismisses the power of google search.
"FFXIV vote dismiss" You're welcome.

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So yeah like I said

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Originally Posted by Sesera

Just because it happens here and there doesn't mean it happens on a daily basis.
How many dungeons you did and how many abusive kick you got?

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The problem with almost any MMORPG. Why ban accounts when you can profit from them.
They choose to ban only some but avoid ban the majority of them. Simply because bots also paying the monthly fee.
I've reported and submitted many bots in-game and I've never seen any ban. They keep gathering the same nodes for months.
So no they don't wanna ban bots. They sometimes ban few of them to show to the masses they are doing something.

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Originally Posted by Adventica6

I've ran over 1500-2000 dungeons in my time playing and not once was I vote kicked, I think you are not telling the true story, like at all.

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I totally agree with you. I also have a feeling he is not telling the whole story because he pretty badmouthing them here about there DPS or how they play and at the same time how great he was.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

I'm not trying to be rude, but my original post said
"My point: If reporting vote kick abuse, harassment or teleporting under the ground does not result in a suspension, why do we even need GM's at all?"

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Okay you seriously need to get over yourself.

You don't know if it was vote kick abuse, you are just assuming. You said yourself you don't know why you were kicked. You could have unknowingly did something that annoyed another player. Perhaps your comment "what happened?" in response to a wipe caused annoyance.

As for your googling, people raging that they got kicked isn't proof of vote kick abuse. It's highly likely a lot of the people are either embellishing their story to appear more innocent, or were woefully unaware that their playstyle was causing an issue. Thousands upon thousands of dungeons are completed by players every day, if vote kick abuse was a widespread issue the forums would be flooded with posts about it, but they're not.

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Originally Posted by Esrain

Again we have another ignorant person who completely dismisses the power of google search.
"FFXIV vote dismiss" You're welcome.

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You're the ignorant person here. You have this wild idea that you are victim of a lack of GM moderation when the truth is you're a victim of your inability to move on from a very minor incident.

Is this going another case of the OP being made out for a fraud I wonder?

Something to keep in mind, a lot of MMOs will do mass bannings at once. So bots and the like may get away with things for awhile, and then after enough have fallen into the net, a mass-ban will happen.

No clue if this is how SE handles certain botting behavior, but it is a fairly common tactic.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

Is this going another case of the OP being made out for a fraud I wonder?

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It's always best to take these kinda threads with a grain of salt. None of us were there, we don't know the whole story, we don't know what really happened and we only get one side of the story. It's no wonder why others are skeptical. I've done many dungeons and never been kicked and the only ones I ever see being kicked were players that were either legitimately griefing the runs or ones that don't meet party requirements outside of random matching systems.