The GM team is completely ineffective.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Snip

What has targeted harassment got to do with RP venue ads? You have no proper rebuttal to my response so you move the goal post to harassment or what? And I understand you said you dislike the excessive ads, but I don't agree a single person should get a warning for something when they as an individual are doing ONE thing, posting a pf or single shout in an area for their venue. That one thing is not against ToS, harassment is. It's not the same. If you reported each member of a group for harassing you they each as an individual are breaking ToS and should be actioned for it.

And I fully get the hating of seeing the same add over and over, there is a brand of shampoo with a kangaroo logo I seen so often on twitch ads I vowed to never buy it I got so sick of seeing it. I do the same if I see the same ad for a venue too much, I won't bother visiting. The filter coming for the game soon will help a lot, I also personally just filter out the shout chat when I am in the cities by swapping to another chat tab with only FC and party chat. I don't need to use any 3rd party to manage the annoyance of the venue shouts. Also if we keep with the rl comparison as much as you hate seeing the same ad on repeat, it's not illegal or punishable. You can filter it out with ad block and refuse to purchase the products of those companies whom you found the marketing of to be irritating.

It just comes across that you have been reporting people advertising their venue but each person on their own has not broke any ToS, they are not spamming the chat excessively and can only make a single PF on their own. Venue PF's are also by default way at the bottom of the list when you first open it, all I see any time I open pf is raids. If I want to pop to a venue I have to filter to other. And if a venue is putting their PF in the wrong category you can report them for that, same for if they shove 18+ or "courts" in the ad also.

We have the means currently to handle the ads, we have more incoming and if players advertising their venue's change their ads in a way to specifically avoid the filters we players use maybe we can make a case that is reportable. Because that's not something you do without forethought and it's intentionally trying to subvert a game system. If they do that I'd be in favour of punishing those players, because they are purposefully dodging a game system to get to players who have taken steps to avoid their ads. Not unlike going on an alt to bother someone who has blocked your main.

[Kazmarek]

I'm sure there have been and I hope something was done about those GMs who ignored harassment. I don't think you'll get a lot of pushback on the idea that GMs should be doing something about harassment, and especially coordinated harassment.

You've also mentioned being upset at GMs not knowing what is and isn't against the ToS. They don't know what's against the ToS and stating that something is or isn't would likely get them fired. The ToS are a legal contract between you and SE. The GM has zero ability to interpret the actual ToS and making a legal interpretation of it would so go beyond their role that I'm sure they've gotten quite strict instructions on not saying anything about that because what they say can be used in court as an official stance of the company.

They probably wouldn't even be able to talk about internal policy, because it's internal and as soon as it gets out individual GMs would be held to account, dramatically limiting the community team's discretion on how to resolve issues. There are reasons why these things are like they are, and you may not like them -- many people don't -- but they're there to protect SE.

This argument isn't meant to come off as hostile, so please do not take it that way.

The way I understood it was that it was the EULA that was the legal agreement and that the TOS is more of a "social" agreement? I'm not a lawyer, I'm not versed whatsoever in legal matters, the only legal education I have is from watching lawyers on youtube, so I'm completely out of my depth when it comes to this particular discussion.

That out of the way.... If the GMs don't know what's against ToS, what exactly is the point of the GM team? Because if they can't make decisions, if they can't interpret the ToS, why do they exist? Someone at the company has to be able to make decisions. From a player standpoint, I'd assume that would be the GM team. If it's not them, then that just reinforces my belief that they're ineffective- whether that be due to being held back by policies from higher ups, or due to general incompetency on their end. I think there needs to better- for both players and GMs.

[Kazmarek]

What has targeted harassment got to do with RP venue ads? You have no proper rebuttal to my response so you move the goal post to harassment or what?

No, I just don't think you actually understand what the discussion is here.

[Sjol]

This argument isn't meant to come off as hostile, so please do not take it that way.

The way I understood it was that it was the EULA that was the legal agreement and that the TOS is more of a "social" agreement? I'm not a lawyer, I'm not versed whatsoever in legal matters, the only legal education I have is from watching lawyers on youtube, so I'm completely out of my depth when it comes to this particular discussion.

That out of the way.... If the GMs don't know what's against ToS, what exactly is the point of the GM team? Because if they can't make decisions, if they can't interpret the ToS, why do they exist? Someone at the company has to be able to make decisions. From a player standpoint, I'd assume that would be the GM team. If it's not them, then that just reinforces my belief that they're ineffective- whether that be due to being held back by policies from higher ups, or due to general incompetency on their end. I think there needs to better- for both players and GMs.

No feelings of hostility taken. I've done work in the legal industry on the software side and ToS are legal documents that do come up in court. While you agreed to the ToS, GM responses are typically controlled by a company confidential set of policies and rules. GMs will likely be given a set of standards to go by and training in order to handle most GM tickets. Tricky ones will be escalated, sometimes more than once up the chain to people who are aware of the consequences of different actions in terms of company reputation and legal consequences. If it's really bad, the internal legal team will be brought in, but that's extremely rare.

The different tier of decision-making is there to be as cost-efficient as possible. You also generally don't want a ton of people capable of deciding things because they will not come to a consensus, so they're mostly just there to run a playbook that tells them how to respond to specific scenarios. If it's not in the playbook, it'll very likely be escalated. It's a pretty common strategy in all call-center like customer support environments. GMs just do it over text.

So, the GM is going to look at your request, check the playbook and make a decision if it lines up to one of their pre-described responses. RMT, instant ban; Stolen account, redirect the customer or handle it; etc. The sad reality is that GMs are often minimum wage (or lower) and are not trusted to do much of anything. A lot of companies I know of are trying to replace them with AI as quickly as possible even when they don't get paid much to begin with. So, you're sadly at the whims of a) how good the playbook is; b) how overworked the GM is; and c) how good their escalation policy is.

[Ravenblade1979]

Why would the GM action a single persons account for spam when it's multiple separate people advertising a venue? You're allowed to advertise your venue, even if you get fed up seeing multiple people from the same venue advertising it. You can block the people and soon we get the chat filters also. If they change policy to disallow groups from advertising RP venues then all it takes is a twat with a vendetta to advertise venues obnoxiously on purpose on an alt account to get other people associated with the venue in trouble. No action should be taken on a single persons account for the actions of other people.

I think most don't understand why people have a issue. The ones who hang in cities tend to have convos and nothing annoys a person more then walls of text from shoutrunners.

I mean they don't actually spam (unlike certain venues on pf) but it's just that wall of text that can break a convo badly and ppl gotta open up chat log to see last thing said.

Even worse when you got several ads popping off. If shouts were down to a sentence or two. I'm sure people wouldn't actually mind.

Although, there's others who realize that 13 is the youngest age according to tos and some even younger play. So they don't want them exposed to it.

Can a gm do anything. Not really. Not without hitting pfs as well as they should be for spam.

I think their fix is this filter thing coming in. So people can add stuff to it so they don't see the stuff.

Venues should be figuring out another avenue to advert with as shoutrunners gonna be increasingly deafened amd I don't mean more spam on pf. Maybe use fellowships for what it was meant for

[Ravenblade1979]

This argument isn't meant to come off as hostile, so please do not take it that way.

The way I understood it was that it was the EULA that was the legal agreement and that the TOS is more of a "social" agreement? I'm not a lawyer, I'm not versed whatsoever in legal matters, the only legal education I have is from watching lawyers on youtube, so I'm completely out of my depth when it comes to this particular discussion.

That out of the way.... If the GMs don't know what's against ToS, what exactly is the point of the GM team? Because if they can't make decisions, if they can't interpret the ToS, why do they exist? Someone at the company has to be able to make decisions. From a player standpoint, I'd assume that would be the GM team. If it's not them, then that just reinforces my belief that they're ineffective- whether that be due to being held back by policies from higher ups, or due to general incompetency on their end. I think there needs to better- for both players and GMs.

When you pulled into the gaol for breaching tos. You will figure out what ruled the gms enforce lol

[LianaThorne]

I think most don't understand why people have a issue. The ones who hang in cities tend to have convos and nothing annoys a person more then walls of text from shoutrunners.

I mean they don't actually spam (unlike certain venues on pf) but it's just that wall of text that can break a convo badly and ppl gotta open up chat log to see last thing said.

Even worse when you got several ads popping off. If shouts were down to a sentence or two. I'm sure people wouldn't actually mind.

Although, there's others who realize that 13 is the youngest age according to tos and some even younger play. So they don't want them exposed to it.

Can a gm do anything. Not really. Not without hitting pfs as well as they should be for spam.

I think their fix is this filter thing coming in. So people can add stuff to it so they don't see the stuff.

Venues should be figuring out another avenue to advert with as shoutrunners gonna be increasingly deafened amd I don't mean more spam on pf. Maybe use fellowships for what it was meant for

They've already started figuring it out by adding symbols and other changes to spelling and such to their ads. People just gonna have to keep up with lingo changes I guess.

[Sjol]

Although, there's others who realize that 13 is the youngest age according to tos and some even younger play. So they don't want them exposed to it.

Kids younger than 13 (or whatever the rated age is for the country a person is in) shouldn't be there if the parent is uncomfortable with the rated content. And parents should be especially careful around online interactions which aren't rated because it would be completely impractical.

As an aside, I guess my experience has been very different from the people complaining about ads in shout. Certainly, I've seen them, though many aren't advertised as being of a sexual nature. They also don't show up that frequently. I'm also on a congested server, so I wouldn't imagine it's because the server is especially dead. It's entirely possible this problem varies greatly from server-to-server.

And personally, I loathe spam and ads, in general. That said, I do recognize that they're part of our post-1900s world and a primary way of getting the word out about your venture or venue. And I do appreciate that the majority of them keep it to private spaces and their ads as salacious-free as possible (at least on my server when I'm looking which is a lot of caveats).

[Ravenblade1979]

They've already started figuring it out by adding symbols and other changes to spelling and such to their ads. People just gonna have to keep up with lingo changes I guess.

Lol it's not hard to add all variants of a venue name to cover all bases.

[Ravenblade1979]

Kids younger than 13 (or whatever the rated age is for the country a person is in) shouldn't be there if the parent is uncomfortable with the rated content. And parents should be especially careful around online interactions which aren't rated because it would be completely impractical.

As an aside, I guess my experience has been very different from the people complaining about ads in shout. Certainly, I've seen them, though many aren't advertised as being of a sexual nature. They also don't show up that frequently. I'm also on a congested server, so I wouldn't imagine it's because the server is especially dead. It's entirely possible this problem varies greatly from server-to-server.

And personally, I loathe spam and ads, in general. That said, I do recognize that they're part of our post-1900s world and a primary way of getting the word out about your venture or venue. And I do appreciate that the majority of them keep it to private spaces and their ads as salacious-free as possible (at least on my server when I'm looking which is a lot of caveats).

I think I read here on the forums or somewhere. A young girl who was playing (who is supervised) went to their parent to ask what a court was. Someone in game decided to try to recruit the player for court work.

It's like....gotta be kidding me.