Issue with Support Desk Response to Harassment

[Viridiana]

Hello,

Earlier today I submitted the following report against a player harassing another player (name edited to protect the guilty):

During a Duty Finder run of Praetorium, XXXX repeatedly asked a new player to skip cutscenes. While this by itself is not reportable, he then attempted to vote dismiss one of the players watching cutscenes as being "AFK" even though said player was present. XXXX then proceeded to engage bosses beyond that point without waiting for the rest of the party.

I received the following response:

Hello and thank you for your GM call.

We understand that you are contacting us for another player and we commend you for assisting them. Regrettably, we cannot take calls on behalf of others. If the player you are assisting is unable to place their own /supportdesk call, please have them contact us via our Support Site at http://support.na.square-enix.com.

Thank you for your patience, and best wishes to you.
FINAL FANTASY XIV Game Master Team

Now, first off, I've reported others before for harassing other players, and received responses indicating that the report was actually being acted upon, so I'm not sure I even believe this response. That said, the response itself is troubling. To see why, look at it from the vantage of the person being falsely dismissed.

They're in a party with 3 (or 7) other people doing a dungeon, when suddenly they get a loading screen to where ever they queued from.
They know it wasn't a Vote Abandon, because no vote ever appeared on their screen.
Therefor, they know it was a Vote Dismiss.
They were not AFK, Offline, Harassing, or Cheating.
Therefor, the Vote Dismiss feature was abused.
Abuse of Vote Dismiss is a reportable offense.
However, they do not know who initiated or approved the Vote Dismiss.
As such, there is 0-1 (or 0-3) innocent players.
The options at this point are to either report everyone, assuming they even remember the character names, or report no one, which allows the behavior to continue without repercussion.
Of course, the issue with reporting everyone (beyond having to track down names) is that you potentially slander 3 people. Needless to say, slandering others is something that should be avoided.

Of course, if the vote dismiss fails, the person who just narrowly avoided being kicked isn't even aware anything's happening unless someone mentions it. Of course they aren't going to report it if they don't even know it happened! Meanwhile, the other people in the party just watched someone try to abuse the Vote Dismiss, which is reportable, but are told that they can't report it on behalf of the person who doesn't even know something wrong is going on. To say that this is troubling is something of and understatement.

In summary, please allow the submission of harassment reports on behalf of other players. Removing undesirable players from the community is of interest to us all, and, in that sense, there is no "on behalf of others."

[Kawab]

I agree a report is a report. which should be investigated. I reported a person for racial comments and asked what actions were taken on the player. They told me their privacy policy doesnt allow them to disclose that info. Now does that make any sense? I am in court he is on trail for harassment to say I shouldnt I know what actions are being taken on the person found guilty after investigation? I believe its possibly a front to let such manners slide but pretend they will take action. Well I wouldnt really know if they take action properly because I am not to know the consequences of their discrimination.

[Ominoussilence]

The player can report an abuse of the vote kick feature and SE can determine who was responsible/participated. Names aren't necessary just a time really. Even if they knew the name they wouldn't know the world, who's to say there aren't more than one character with that name in your data center.

[Duuude007]

Abuse of vote kick is the only thing he did against tos from the looks of it, however.

[Nutz]

That is a bit ridiculous and I've got to say I never really thought about it like that. I suppose I can say that I've never been vote kicked, but I wonder if someone's ever initiated it. I've voted against kicking people countless times and it passed or didn't. I hadn't thought about the fact that the times it didn't pass they were completely unaware of the fact, especially since in roughly half of those instances the person in question was, well, perhaps not a great player, but not doing anything willfully harmful. Given the structure of the system it actually makes more sense for players to report on behalf of others in situations like these. Without explicit communication on the issue the offended player has no idea what happened, unless it passed, and by that time it's too late to take note of who did it (except I suppose gathering names from the battle log, but again, who's innocent and what server are they on anyway?).

[Viridiana]

Abuse of vote kick is the only thing he did against tos from the looks of it, however.

I mentioned that in the ticket, because I knew that rushing the player wasn't reportable.

Names aren't necessary just a time really. Even if they knew the name they wouldn't know the world, who's to say there aren't more than one character with that name in your data center.

Yeah, I've been fortunate thus far that the people I've had to report have either been from my server or had unique names. As long as the name's not too popular, I can usually identify the person who did it. But, then, I wouldn't put it in the report unless I was certain I had the right one. In this case, a Lodestone search showed only one result for the name.