Months of harassment

[Corvus_V]

Well, an IP ban can be skirted around, and apparently so to can banning the payment methods used. Banning his main account means that if he can skirt around an IP ban and a payment method ban, he can just quick level a new account and continue to do what he's already been doing. While the options might be there, they all seem like bandaids to a much bigger problem at hand. The GMs really, really need to figure something out.

Like I said, this is such an awful situation.

A deterrent is better than nothing. It matters much less if it's possible to work around it; and more so that it takes so obnoxiously long to enable it in the first place: i.e, becoming a mentor, or changing your IP over and over in addition to making new accounts, and getting a new payment method.

Time is just as limited a resource as money. The more efficiently we waste his time in his efforts to be annoying, the less likely he is to do so (or the more time we get spam-free). There's no reason they shouldn't focus on banning the mentor, permenantly, his IP, and his payment method; so he has to change all 3, level a new account and character, just to try again, and risk getting again permenantly banned, his character deleted, his payment method banned, and his IP banned. No? How is that not good enough? The only concern is "if its draconian" but honestly if anyone deserves no sympathy, its this guy.

[PanderpZack]

12/22/2020 - 11:39 PM Central on Adamantoise

Language was popping up as Georgian or Marathi, and could not find any translations
so I don't know what it says if it is offensive.

https://imgur.com/a/DfreKYH

[MilkieTea]

A deterrant is better than nothing. It matters much less if it's possible to work around it; and more so that it takes so obnoxiously long to enable it in the first place: i.e, becoming a mentor, or changing your IP over and over in addition to making new accounts, and getting a new payment method.

To be fair, thinking about it now, getting a new payment method is extremely easy. One can also just become a trade mentor, as from my understanding that simply requires two lvl 80 trade classes. And even if this werent the case, this guy seems determined enough to make people miserable, he quite literally seems to have nothing better to do.

A deterrant *is* better than nothing, but something needs to be done *other than* a deterrant, bc from what I've seen in just this thread alone, this guy seems absolutely determined to make people's lives miserable. IMO there has to be some form of legal backlash because I don't think a deterrant is going to make him back down.

[MilkieTea]

snip

Time is just as limited a resource as money. The more efficiently we waste his time in his efforts to be annoying, the less likely he is to do so (or the more time we get spam-free). There's no reason they shouldn't focus on banning the mentor, permenantly, his IP, and his payment method; so he has to change all 3, level a new account and character, just to try again, and risk getting again permenantly banned, his character deleted, his payment method banned, and his IP banned. No? How is that not good enough? The only concern is "if its draconian" but honestly if anyone deserves no sympathy, its this guy.

Ah, simple misunderstanding. What you're describing isn't draconian at all, but because of the level of harassment faced by everyone on this thread, I personally think that there needs to be a level of legal repercussion. For people like this, simply banning them isn't going to work. For example, I once dealt with targeted harassment in which the person was permanently banned 40+ times, simply factory reset their phone, reset their router, and made a new account to target me yet again. It only ended when I served them with a restraining order that threatened with the very harsh reality that they could be put away in prison if they continued. And even then, I'm pretty sure they've probably made a new account ready to begin again once the time on the restraining order is over.

For people like this, there needs to be a concerted effort on the parts of the GMs to figure out a way to legally battle this. For people like you and me, simply the threat of banning would be enough (heck, we wouldnt even *do* this). But not for these types.

[Corvus_V]

To be fair, thinking about it now, getting a new payment method is extremely easy. One can also just become a trade mentor, as from my understanding that simply requires two lvl 80 trade classes. And even if this werent the case, this guy seems determined enough to make people miserable, he quite literally seems to have nothing better to do.

A deterrant *is* better than nothing, but something needs to be done *other than* a deterrant, bc from what I've seen in just this thread alone, this guy seems absolutely determined to make people's lives miserable. IMO there has to be some form of legal backlash because I don't think a deterrant is going to make him back down.

That's fair, and while I'd prefer they spared no expense, I'm just trying to think from a practical standpoint the minimum amount of effort they could put it in to stagger this sackbrain for a week or two. I doubt he'd be as persitent then, but even if he was at the very least NN would be situation normal for a while.

[Tsumdere]

If they just keep a log or show us who is inviting who, we can report the person who is inviting them in the first place. I do on the other hand doubt that an IP ban would be completely impossible. People get IP banned from websites all the time, and public proxies are typically so overused by bots that they're also banned as well. If he wants to go through the extra effort of getting a literal new credit card, or paypal, and IP address just for the sake of spamming, its much easier to ban him again, and his mentor account (which he uses to add them) than it is to replace that. He'd definitely be bashing his thick skull against something of much higher density.

I would put this in spoiler tags as it's just an explanation of why I would know this, but I can't remember how to spoiler for the life of me.

IP banning is usually a last resort by games because certain places like college campuses or entire countries share the same IP address. For companies trying to make money, banning entire schools/countries/cities is a terrible move only done in extreme circumstances where the threat of the player continuing to play is possibly losing them more money than they would lose by blanket banning people. Websites on the other hand like forums and the such, don't stand to lose much by accidentally catching randos in the crossfire.

Without going into too much detail, I used to work for a huge online game that only had THREE people IP banned. The game had millions of players, almost a decade of history and only THREE people ever got extreme enough to warrant the IP ban.


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Straight up tho - just need a GM to sit in the NN and catch this guy every time and shut his accounts down. Remove the messages as they show up, if possible.

[Chie_M]

The guy has shown up on three different characters on Cactuar within the past hour now.

He also takes it personally if you manage to kick him before he can leave the server and direct insults at specific people when it happens.

This has gotten to a point where I think they need to start making NN in general invite only since it apparently shoves all new characters in there by default presently.

Someone is inviting him. Sprouts still need to be actively invited. Only returners (flowers) are auto-added.

[Shibi]

IP banning is usually a last resort by games because certain places like college campuses or entire countries share the same IP address.

Most people - when talking about IP bans - actually mean MAC/SystemID bans.

As you say, CGNAT (and DHCP with short lease times for that matter) universally preclude a ban on IP address. MAC bans are trivially easy to bypass, of course, system ID is a little harder if done correctly, but still not impossible for people who know how to edit things like their Disk UUIDs. Financial bans also stop some people, moreso if pre-paid visa cards are disallowed - but even that doesn't stop everyone.

As with anything there isn't one particular technical method that will work in a foolproof manner.

[Wuffleton]

Absolute joke how the forum mods here will outright ban our community members for coming forward about continued harassment and a whole host of worse offenses from this individual instead of removing posts or issuing warnings for first time offenses.

Floors me how people are getting forum bans for reporting reportable behavior as a huge reach for witch hunting over screenshots that weren't 100% properly blacked out. I doubt any of of them are even on Aether.

If the system was functioning as intended, none of us would be here trying to help corroborate the original reports and provide more information, especially since the in-game report system takes orders of magnitudes longer and we just get a brush off scripted reply from a GM anyway.

[AstraBraifort]

Absolute joke how the forum mods here will outright ban our community members for coming forward about continued harassment and a whole host of worse offenses from this individual instead of removing posts or issuing warnings for first time offenses.

Floors me how people are getting forum bans for reporting reportable behavior as a huge reach for witch hunting over screenshots that weren't 100% properly blacked out. I doubt any of of them are even on Aether.

If the system was functioning as intended, none of us would be here trying to help corroborate the original reports and provide more information, especially since the in-game report system takes orders of magnitudes longer and we just get a brush off scripted reply from a GM anyway.

Seriously, instead of banning people witnessing this, please tell us how we're supposed to get anything done about this. The dozens upon dozens of in-game reports aren't doing anything meaningful, and forum posts will need screenshots of evidence in order to contextualize just how AWFUL this harassment is. Multiple people from multiple servers in the DC have come forward in this thread about this situation. People are saying their gameplay is being ruined and are actively avoiding playing on the DC because of this guy. And who knows just how many sprouts see the wall of slurs and leave the channel, which may be their only avenue of getting help in the game. This spamming has been going on since at least the 15th, so can you imagine starting the game only to see a week straight of slurs spammed in the novice network? GMs say they're investigating but we're seeing no signs of that. There's no slowing down of the harassment at all. In fact, he's ramping up and even actively targeting players in retaliation.